advice

Just Keep Building

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Do you ever get overwhelmed with software complexity?  There is always it seems, a new framework this and a doomaflagit-that coming out.  More to learn, more to learn. Learning is not a bad thing.  As we all know in IT, that’s kinda our thing … we keep doing that learning thing. The upside of this … Read more

What If You Need a Team?

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In my last post, we talked about “Are You Team A or Team B?” and ran through what those teams might look like. I showed the post to a friend of mine and he noted that I might be leaving some folks out.  Maybe folks that are just looking to get on their first team at … Read more

Are You Team A or Team B?

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Today I wanted to talk a bit about team environments. If you’ve been in IT for awhile, having worked on a few teams, you’ll get where I’m coming from. If you’re still a bit green to the industry, take heart, for today I will explain the two main team buckets out there in our field.  … Read more

What is up with all the 8 Hate?

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I for one do not get all the “8 Hate” out there. Although I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised. Each time that Microsoft releases a new version of Windows there is an giant amount of criticism.  People hated Windows 7, people hated Windows XP.  People have hated every version of Windows out there. So … Read more

To log or not to log …

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To Log or Not to Log Honestly, really?  Let’s hope we’re not still asking ourselves that question in 2012 kids.  Say in ain’t so! So let’s say its safe to assume we’re all logging things somewhere. The question is not “to log or not to log” but rather where should yon logs go? (yon logs … Read more

Get a clue! or .. write a requirement

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Guys and gals, we’ve all done it. Written code without requirements. Me too. Guilty. However what is your preference? Are you the developer that needs a mountain of documentation that details your every line of code? Are you the developer that thrives on having some creativity by just having a loose outline of what is … Read more

The Simpleton Pattern

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Simpleton UniversityNo, you read that correctly.  Simpleton, not Singleton is the subject of choice today.  Recently a fellow developer was looking over some code that I had written.

He commented on it by saying, “Rob I just love looking at your code.  It’s simple, easy to read, well-commented, and just makes sense”.

I replied, “Well that’s likely because I’m a simpleton”.

So jokes ensued with my friend asking, “Is that the design pattern you follow?”.  I thought, well yeah actually I guess it is and thus was born the idea for this blog post.

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The Pessimistic Programmer

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If you’re a programmer of any kind and have done it for any length of time at all; particularly as your profession, not just a hobby, you know this one rule:

Good programmers expect things to go bad.

One of our prime directives as lord or lady of the bits and bytes is to predict what can go wrong and prevent it.  Or at the worst case, handle it gracefully.

Being a developer isn’t exactly all baby giggles and sunbeams so a healthy amount of pessimism is certainly warranted.

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Check it and check it again

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The other day at work an interesting thing happened. I was working with someone else in order to troubleshoot an issue with pushing some software out to our live site. I had tested my changes on my local machine as well as the test site. So we rolled things out to an external test site so our client could preview the changes before we flipped the final switch.  Drum roll please …