Posts tagged with "programming"

  • On Working Alone

    Earlier this year I quit my job to work full-time on an open source ecommerce framework. After three years working as the lead of a small team within a department of around 20 devs, I’m now back to working alone. Here are some reflections on the thrills and perils of the lone developer. Photo by Noah Silliman on Unsplash Communication & Efficiency The problems of development teams are essentially problems of communication.

  • A Tale of Two Issues

    Zoid is a JavaScript library for simple arithmetic operations. The project has been around for a few years and has a sole maintainer, who works on it in her free time. Photo by Oliver Thomas Klein on Unsplash Here are a couple of issues picked out of the issue tracker - one from a couple of years ago and one very recent, presented without comment. Issue #37 - clicking button does not add 1 hecter88 commented on Jul 13, 2015 Hey.

  • The Elevator of Infinite Abstraction

    In software development, we often hear and speak of abstractions. When we use this term, we often mean some variation on concepts such as “hiding the implementation details”, “providing an interface”, “modelling a data type” or even “removing duplicate code”. But what is the essence of abstraction? The origin of "abstract" in the Macmillan Dictionary for Students I was recently looking up the term “abstract” in a dictionary, and was struck with the origin of the word:

  • Why I Haven’t Fixed Your Issue Yet

    Hi there. You opened an issue with my project on GitHub, and it’s getting kind of stale by now. I am aware of it - GitHub was kind enough to send me an email containing your report, which I scanned one morning a couple of weeks ago while I ate breakfast. I’ve even thought about it briefly a couple of times since then; once I was in the shower and I got the vague idea that I knew what caused it - but I wasn’t sure because I could not recall the specifics.

  • The Programmer Dad

    I’ve not typed a semicolon for a couple of weeks now. I don’t mean the look-at-me-I-know-fancy-punctuation kind (there will be plenty of those here). I am of course referring to ;, the token that denotes the end of a statement. No, I’ve not ditched JavaScript for Python or Erlang; I’m on holiday. I’m getting back to (half of) my roots in beautiful Malaysia, and as a result I’ve not done any programming at all.

  • One Year of GitHub and Open Source

    Next week sees the close of my first year as an active participant on GitHub and in the open source community. I’d like to mark the occasion by collecting together a few thoughts on my experience thus far. At the beginning of this year I wrote about my decidedly shaky start in the world of professional software development in the essay Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer. For those who have read the sorry tale, it’ll come as little surprise that it was only fairly recently that I started using any kind of version control system.

  • What Makes A Good Tech Talk?

    When I moved to Vienna last October, I was pleased to find a very active and vibrant development community. Just this week alone, there have been at least 19 tech meetups in the city. A quick search on meetup.com reveals 46 tech-related meetup groups at the time of this writing, and there’s even a website dedicated to listing all the meetups each week. During my time here so far, I’ve found the local tech meetups a great way to learn and improve as a developer, as well as a way to get involved in the community and get to know some cool people in a new city.

  • Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

    I am an intermediate programmer. I have a pretty good grasp of the basics. I have made enough mistakes to have a good idea why they were mistakes. I am aware that there is a lot that I need to know more about. Crucially, I have some idea of what those things are, and I am actively and energetically working on improving. It has taken a while for me to get to the point where I am confident enough to admit that I am only average in ability.