Presentation Patterns is 228 pages of information about how to give a good presentation. What’s most interesting about this is that only 16 of them need to be read in serious depth. The rest are browsed, searched for, cross-referenced, and looked up as you go, like a choose-your-own-adventure book meets tvtropes.org . Even though it was a bit tedious at times, I found myself thoroughly enjoying…
Squashing pull requests is a common theme in many software projects that use git for version control. I won’t go over the reasons why in depth, but rather focus on a workflow that can help address a lot of the controversy around squashing pull requests into a single commit. Let’s say I’m creating a new feature on a branch, and like many developers, I choose to commit early and often . Every new…
Here’s a simple habit that can make working with numbered lists in markdown much simpler, especially if you’re still mentally figuring out the order of the list as you’re typing it. Typically, numbered lists in markdown are demonstrated in a simple, straightforward fashion. 1. A list 2. Where order 3. Matters greatly 4. And could change 5. In the future Now, should I need to add a step that I…
This review is dedicated to my brother, who got me a copy of this album, urging me to listen to it. I wasn’t supposed to judge it, and simply listen to it with an open mind and let him know what I thought. I did, and I guess the best way I can think to prove this to him is to write a review of Mark Ronson’s latest release, “Uptown Special”. Before I begin, there are two things you should…
This is my fifth year writing software. As I continue my development in the trade, I find myself spending more and more time interacting with people who’s level of contribution now exceeds that of an “individual contributor”. They are much too talented to be writing any more code, so their superiors would like to say. Their time would be much better spent discussing the problems that some given…
What impressed me most about this film is that the book it was based on was written by Jordan Belfort, further proving that you can get rich writing a book about getting rich. Although the gratuitous nudity and drug use make it difficult to publicly recommend, the charm of a rags to riches story is certainly enhanced here by revisiting the rags, and the trip back and forth is conveyed with plenty…
Most github users are aware of tagging issues and pull requests to organize them better. Some also know that it’s a good idea to create your own tags to suit your team’s individual needs. Our team uses some tags that help deal with communication in larger projects with many collaborators. They’re not the usual permanent issue labels, but rather, stateful indicators that alert teammates what the…
If you use Travis CI to run your end to end tests, you may want to start with something simple and run a local selenium server to communicate with the browser. Although SauceLabs is a really powerful tool for mature, cross-browser projects with solid testing procedures, it can be a bit of a burden to sign up for, pay for, and configure it for Travis CI runs. For something like the project I’m…
The free CICD site drone.io is a really useful, lightweight replacement for Jenkins for free, open source repositories. Being purpose built for just one thing means setting up a new project takes literally a tenth of the time compared to Jenkins. But one thing it is lacking is the ability to run CICD tests against new pull requests that have had master merged into it first, and updating the status…
On Friday, I had finished my tasks for the day a little early and decided to check up on the co-workers around me, just to see if any of them had anything blocking them, or anything interesting they’d like to show off to me. It turns out one had been stuck on an issue for the last 45 minutes. He had at least fifteen tabs open, sighed a lot, and was visibly exhausted. Basically, he was sending…
Today I saw a co-worker take a link from a specific line number in our team’s github repository and place it in the comments section of a user story. This is very helpful for those who need to see a quick reference to the code that could be causing a defect, but it’s wrong . Here’s what you need to do instead. First, the original setup had a link that looked like this.…
When reviewing pull requests, I’ve noticed it’s way too easy to scan through the green and red lines, compare them quickly in your mind, and make hasty decisions about what’s changed in the code. Here’s a secret: when code changes, it changes in more places than what’s shown in the diff. It sounds strange, but it’s true. You look at the diff of a two line change, scan the green line, the red line,…
After working through a tricky situation in an intern’s git repository (her co-worker had literally squashed everything on master into one commit), I was asked how I did it. This led to some passing remarks from others participating in the conversation that almost everything I was showing her involved “bad, destructive commands”, and I immediately agreed. My git work flow is centered around many…
Last week, one of my co-workers showed me a really nice trick you can use if you find yourself needing to validate some snippet that features a javascript library. Here, I was about to test whether or not I could sort the results of a map call in lodash by going through the typical ceremony of using require in the node interpreter environment. Fortunately, said co-worker was working with me when…
I have a special function called pcat , which stands for “pretty catenate”, saved in my dotfiles repository on github. I really wish this style of cat would be the default on modern machines. Here it is, sans link: function pcat() { pygmentize -f terminal256 -O style=native -g $1 | less; } alias cat=pcat I’ve omitted the part where you get pip installed on your machine first, and install the…