About Me
Helping my Friendgineers whenever possible
Latest Articles
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Indirection Vs. Abstraction
Abstractions may be indirections, but indirections are NOT abstractions. Confuse them at your own peril. -
Testing Is More Than Preventing Breakage
If you think about tests as the last thing you do you're missing out on some of the biggest benefits of testing. You can learn a lot about what your code SHOULD do by thinking about your tests first. -
Stuttering
Sometimes we are our own worst enemy. Here's a story of my spending WAY too much time trying to figure out why one of the core functions of one of my core tools was broken. Even though it wasn't. It can happen, but that's probably not the most likely thing to be wrong. -
Optimization
You can find lessons in the strangest things if you let yourself. There are even lessons to be learned from the holes in a bar of soap. -
Writing Legacy Code
One of the hardest things for a person to admit, to themselves or others, is that some painm they're feeling is self-inflicted. But it's also one of the things that has the highest return on investment. Or to put it another way, the code we write is hard to work on because we wrote it that way. So it's up to US to do something about it. -
Who Do You Love?
When you love the right thing you know what to do and how to move forward. When you focus on the wrong thing then the path forward isn't nearly as clear. -
Practice Makes Perfect?
Practice, practice, practice. Do that enough and you'll become an expert. That's all you need to do and all you need to know, right? Not quite. It's important, even critical, but it's NOT enough -
Power Dynamics
You always need to be careful what you say, because you can't be sure how people will here it. Add in a power differential and things can easily go off the rails. -
Exsqueeze Me?
There are lots of good reasons to remove tests. There are even more reasons to keep them. Or, if there's a problem, FIX them. -
The Messy Middle
It's hard to be stuck in the middle. But if you pay attention and know that important things can happen in the middle you can turn the messy middle into an advantage.
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