This is the city, St Louis. I work here. My name is Rob. I write code. I carry a badge.
Continuing our series on Devup 2018 (gosh I wrote that like I have a huge readership) let me introduce another rockstar, Angela Dugan. If you get a chance to hear Angela speak, particularly on the subject of soft skills, make it a point to be there. I first heard Angela speak at Devup in 2017 … Read more
Lyndsey Padget. Learner. Public speaker. Writer. Badass. Lyndsey gave this incredible session at Devup this year called Badass 101. I’d never heard Lyndsey before but this won’t be the last time I attend a session led by her, I can tell you that much. This was different. Different in a very good way! It was … Read more
Back at my second real IT job, we did not have what some would call today “true” agile practices. I say that because we did a great deal of up-front design work, requirements gathering, and signoffs. Those are all things that most “agile” shops I’ve worked with avoid like the plague. Somehow though, at that job, we seemed … Read more
Ok dudes and dudettes, I’m a weird duck. I get that. 🙂 Also, in my last post, I know I promised a different topic for this time but I had to get this one out. Perhaps on 2/10, I’ll unleash the post I had mentioned. Maybe this is just a picture of how strangely my … Read more
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
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.
A lot of highly analytical folks I’ve met over the years have not been the best communicators. Heck I was first mentored by a Unix admin. He was not known for the leading you by the hand approach. Ok, that’s not fair. He’d lead you once but you’d better, by cracky, take copious notes and never have to ask about that thing again or suffer The Look.
Anybody with me on that one? Been there?