The thin line between value and distraction| Joep Schuurkes
I’ve had the song “Stuck in the Middle with You” in my head for a few weeks. (R.I.P. Michael Madsen!) 1 But not because of Reservoir Dogs - but because of the public discussion about AI coding tools. (Yes, I know… feel free to walk away if you are sick of the whole thing). I feel like there’s this strange culture war, or something like it, playing out - with wild statements on both extremes - and I’m stuck in the middle. Hype To the left of me There is just so much AI Hype. I’m ...| Korny’s Blog
I thought it’d be worth posting an example of a bigger task I did the other day - just to show what can be done, without crazy vibe-coding, on a non-greenfields app, using ASP.Net Core not some simplistic front-end tooling. This was originally part of a longer post but I thought it was worth splitting - this example is used in my post Clowns to the left of me … The task - Sending a message when data changes We have an ASP.Net core application which includes a relationship between Business...| Korny’s Blog
Caleb racked his brain trying to come up with the right dynamic programming recurrence for this medium LeetCode problem. He’d never used DP at work. In fact, he didn’t believe anyone had. So why did companies keep asking them? It wasn’t like it mattered anyway, since he couldn’t even get past the resume screening. It […]| Axol's Blog
Caleb published his pull request. It had been Steve’s idea to wait until the last day of the sprint before doing so. As he put it, “Such pressure causes standards to buckle.” In t…| Axol's Blog
“Have you ever pondered how user privileges are stored?” Steve asked. “In our PostgreSQL database, obviously. It’s the only one we have.” Caleb responded nonchalantly, wishing the company had licensed a NoSQL database as well. “How. Not where.” Caleb hadn’t the faintest clue. He’d never ventured outside the schema holding the tables of the greenfield […]| Axol's Blog
Caleb’s senior engineer coworker, Greg, gave his standup update, “So umm yeah, yesterday I spent like an hour updating my JIRA tickets, and I had to pick up my daughter from school. Tha…| Axol's Blog
Steve Miller’s calendar had been filled up to the next two weeks. The sprint would be over by then, and Caleb would take the blame for failing his task. He had to come up with something quick. Maybe ambush Steve with a Teams call the second his status turned green in between meetings. It was […]| Axol's Blog
A great pleasure of remote work is that you can go a whole workday without interacting with anyone. Bonus if you’re a self-described “introverted” engineer who finds conversation …| Axol's Blog
Some history on term “technical debt” and on better language to use when communicating about it.| Luke Plant's home page
Medium for some reason thinks I continue to want to read about the demise of Agile project management methodologies for making software. My daily email has headline after headline by Product Manage…| Ask The UXer
A method to provide common data analysis and exploration, such as lists, filtering, searching, analysis, editing and charting, across a variety of heterogenous tables, without code duplication.| Musing Mortoray
Starting today I’m excited to be working on a new team, with my C++ standards and community roles unchanged. I also wanted to write a few words about why I’m excited about continuing to invest my time heavily in C++’s standardization and evolution especially now, because I think 2024 has been a pivotal year for … Continue reading A new chapter, and thoughts on a pivotal year for C++→| Sutter’s Mill
Design later and test earlier for better software.| Joep Schuurkes
Meet Devon. He has worked as a backend software developer for eight years. He specializes in Java, and only Java. It was the first programming language he learned and it’s the last one heR…| Axol's Blog
The Limits of Prototyping in Agile Development Central thesis of why software development is hard, and Part 1 So pretty soon in the late 90s it became common to find out what humans wanted out of c…| Ask The UXer
The workflow of recursively searching for things or dealing with a list of issues to fix without getting lost.| Luke Plant's home page
“Where have all the task decompositions gone?” I was talking to a very experienced Head of UX about the state of our vocation when she asked that. I had to agree I have not seen one in …| Ask The UXer
Intro To Pull Requests A pull request is when you are wanting to merge code from one git branch to another, and instead of just merging it yourself, you send a request to another developer to review the changes and merge the code into the desired…| Leigh Halliday's RSS Feed
Exploratory testing is a learned skill. Which skills? These nine!| Joep Schuurkes
Being intentional about exploratory testing, i.e. exploring and evaluating what you are building and what you have built throughout the development process, is a key skill in a high-performing team.| Joep Schuurkes
I am writing some code that does some smoke tests with capybara in a browser of some Javascript code. Frustratingly, it was failing when run in CI on Github Actions, in ways that I could not reproduce locally. (Of course it ended up being a configuration problem on CI, which you’d expect in this case). … Continue reading Getting rspec/capybara browser console output for failed tests→| Bibliographic Wilderness
There are several straightforward ways to distinguish a test case from a requirement. A test case tells you how to check some kind of thing about the application, a requirement tells you that the appl| Joep Schuurkes
Elixir in Action author Saša JurićIn the final article of this series we’ll take a look at our approach to testing at Very Big Things. As always, when discussing some practice or technique, it’s worth defining the purpose, i.e. the benefits that we want to reap. When it comes to tests, we write them to verify that the system is working as expected. A good test suite will fail when something is off in the behaviour of the system. If everything works correctly, all of the tests should p...| Very Big Things - Medium
Elixir in Action author Saša JurićSo far in this series I’ve focused on the higher level code design. Today I’ll dive a bit deeper and show the code of a typical context (core) module in Very Big Things’ projects. This article will repeat a few points from the previous posts, but it’s worth consolidating this information in a single place.| Very Big Things - Medium
Elixir in Action author Saša JurićThe previous article discussed the high-level design of Very Big Things’ projects. Today we’ll dive a bit deeper and take a look at the namespace structure. The word namespace here refers to dot-separated module names. For example, the MySystem namespace will include the MySystem module, as well as “sub-modules”, such as MySystem.Account or MySystem.Repo. Likewise, MySystemWeb is another namespace, containing modules such as MySystemWeb.Endpoint, a...| Very Big Things - Medium
Elixir in Action author Saša JurićIn my previous article, I presented the development process used at Very Big Things. Now it’s time to turn our attention to the code. As developers, we spend a lot of our time inside the source code, so it could be argued that it is an important part of our working environment. To do our job efficiently we need our environment to be well organized. In development, this is the role of code design.| Very Big Things - Medium
Elixir in Actionauthor Saša JurićThis is the first in a series of articles where we’ll be presenting our approach to building a maintainable Elixir codebase. To provide a bit of context, Very Big Things is a digital products agency with a dynamic software development tempo. New projects are started frequently and priorities sometimes change suddenly. An intensive project developed today might be put on hold tomorrow and need to be resumed after a few weeks or months. In the meantime, the...| Very Big Things - Medium
[Ed. note: While we take some time to rest up over the holidays and prepare for next year, we are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. Please enjoy our favorite work this year and we’ll see you in 2024.]| stackoverflow.blog