October 2025 – Axol's Blog
1 post published by TheAxolot during October 2025| Axol's Blog
What’s the quickest giveaway that someone’s an amateur developer? When they tell you to break out a function into smaller functions, and the first reason they cite is “it’s …| Axol's Blog
In an earlier article, I tore through some terrible arguments used to advocate for TDD that I see all too often (even by experienced engineers). I said in that piece that I would eventually go thro…| Axol's Blog
I don’t read fiction that much. I used to when I was a kid, but not anymore, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I have a compulsive need for story closure, even when I’…| Axol's Blog
Correction: Throughout this article, I attribute Chapter 2 of Clean Code to Robert Martin, however I was recently informed that this particular chapter was actually authored by Tim Ottinger. That s…| Axol's Blog
If you’ve read my previous articles on TDD (here and here), you’d know I have complicated feelings about it. If you’ve read my review of a critically acclaimed novel, you’d …| Axol's Blog
If civil engineering is a mature field, then software development is a baby. An ugly baby, but perhaps a late bloomer. The so-called “best practices” of our industry are a chaotic nebul…| Axol's Blog
Oh imagine a land It’s a faraway place Where the good faith debates are held Where the winner is the best Where each point gets addressed And the bad faith ones are quelled Where the activist…| Axol'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
The circularity Of meritocracy I see hypocrisy Don’t think it’s lost on me Joe: Schools are a meritocracy, because the best students get the best grades. Amy: What it does it mean to be the best student? Joe: Studying, doing assignments, and acing tests to get the best grades. Joe: Successful company leadership is a […]| 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
Here’s a riddle: What do TDD and communism have in common? The answer: Everyone has their own idea of what it should look like, so you’re always doing it wrong. You’d think that a…| Axol's Blog
