Difficult Concept #0 There are "difficult concepts", which can provide enormous value when we explore, experience, and act through them, but which we can never bring entirely within our reach. Welcome to a new series of muses, the difficult concepts series, to which this is the prelude. As always with the muses, these are improv, […]
Difficult Concepts #0: A Prelude Read More »
I’ve spoken of thick vs thin culture. And my earlier muse was mostly for boss-types, and I promised to do the same for non-bosstypes. But I need to pause here, and do something different. I need to talk about mentoring/coaching to create proper context. (I should pre-announce, i’m semi-lit. I doubt I could pull this
GeePawing & Mentoring Read More »
What to do, what to do, around this larger topic i’ve been banging against recently: the extraordinary thinness of culture in geekery. I should say at the outset, I don’t have the answer. I don’t think there maybe even is a "the answer". And I don’t have an answer. I think there are several possible
Thick And Thin Culture Read More »
I wanna muse about roughly 17 things. But i’m gonna try to relate them to a single message. The additional challenge, some of u may be in a place where this message will sound like an attack. Please please believe it is not meant to be that. The message: you gotta get past this impostor
Getting Past Impostor Syndrome Read More »
My five TDD premises stuff has been well-received over the months since I put it out, but one of them seems still very underplayed, even by many died-in-the-wool TDD’ers: the correlation premise. The correlation premise says that the internal quality of our code correlates directly with our productivity. When the internal quality goes up, productivity
The Correlation Premise: Redux Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: Prevent complex test data from spiraling out of control by going to builder & custom comparator early on. The push-to-small, coupled with SOLID, coupled with things like third normal form, all lead us to a place of wanting to compose domain objects into potentially very rich dependency graphs. A card in a address-tracking
TDD Pro-Tip: Start Builders & Partial Comparators Early Read More »
I’ve mentioned "acculturation" a couple of times lately. Let’s dig in a little deeper on that. In our trade, we make much of "education", training and learning and skills inventories and such-like. I say we make much of it, well. That’s an overstatement, of course. Companies talk about it a great deal. But i’m often
Acculturation: A Little Deeper Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: "No, smaller." In TDD, almost without exception, we want everything: a test, a method, a class, a step, a file, really, almost everything, to be as small as it can be and still add value to what we’re doing. This is the most common gaping hole in the practice of the noob, and
TDD Pro-Tip: ‘No, Smaller. Read More »
So, I’m out there slinging advice about how to change the world of being a professional programmer. Maybe y’all need to hear some things about that, that might not have occurred to you. I am just some schmoe. I am having a successful life in the world of geekery. There are a host of causes
Slinging Advice and Where I Come From With It Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: TDD and refactoring are permanently intertwined activities, neither of which can be grasped all at once, so start learning how to write tests at the same time you’re learning how to change code w/o adding bugs to it. Some activities are what I think of as "life games". The better you get at
TDD Pro-Tip: TDD & Refactoring Are Intertwined Life-Game Read More »
