Writings on software development, testing, and architecture. .NET C# Tools Testing whiteboarding design
Is your team using Spec Kit , but you hate having to remember the sequence /speckit-specify => /speckit-plan => /speckit-tasks => /speckit-implement ? you know it’s going to get it right, and let’s be honest, you’re not going to review all of that intermediate output anyway (you should, though). Well, you should check out Spec Kit workflows . I don’t see much discussion of this feature in the Spec…
We’ve all done it. You commit a file you shouldn’t have. A .env , a node_modules/ you forgot to ignore, some local config, a stray build folder. So you add it to .gitignore … and git keeps tracking it anyway. That’s because .gitignore only governs untracked files. Once git is already tracking something, ignoring it does nothing. 🤦♂️ The actual fix is two steps: git rm --cached path/to/file echo…
I keep having this conversation. Different companies, different people, different contexts. And I keep landing in the same place. Software engineering teams are some of the worst managed teams in any industry. Maybe the worst. I’ve seen it across every company I’ve worked at, every company I’ve talked to, and every leadership team I’ve consulted with. It’s pervasive. And the wild part? It’s not…
Here’s something I say a lot that usually gets a reaction: we are not strangers on the internet. The open-source PR model — push your work, notify the team, hope someone picks it up, iterate based on comments — makes total sense when contributors don’t know each other and are working across time zones and organizations with no shared context. It was built for that. It works great for that. It does…
One of the things I keep saying to engineering teams right now is: this tool should improve the process on all fronts. Not just the building. All of it. AI-assisted development is genuinely remarkable. Engineers are shipping features faster, clearing backlogs that felt immovable, and getting real leverage from tooling that would’ve taken months to build before. I’m a fan. I’m actively encouraging…
I’ve had some version of this conversation with multiple engineering leaders lately, and I keep landing in the same place: quality is a team sport, and most teams haven’t figured that out yet. Here’s the dynamic I see a lot. You’ve got developers who write their code, write their tests (maybe), and hand the whole thing off. Somewhere downstream, a tester or QA person picks it up and starts poking…
By Gerald Singleton & Clint Parker Intro Continuous integration & deployment. Automated testing. Refactoring & taking control of the monolith. Reducing cycle time. Increased uptime. Optimizing the data layer. Putting stakeholders in control. Making customers happy. We’ve done all that. And it was all easier with our aggressive adoption of feature flags. Using flags by default has unblocked all of…
My team has seen a lot of changes in the last year. These are things that we didn’t really have in 2022 but are became a part of our day-to-day in 2023. Feature flags We started to introduce the concept of flags in late 2022 but didn’t adopt them until 2023. We’ve rewritten the framework a few times. The team has created guidelines for flag creation, management, and removal. We’ve introduced over…
A healthy engineering organization (or any healthy team, for that matter) should be tracking itself across a variety of metrics. This is not covered by the standard CS curriculum but is readily encountered in the real world. Once someone is paying for software, there will invariably be questions about how that money is being spent. The most common metrics are bug count and velocity. Followed by…
I was once asked about the most inventive or innovative thing I’d done. Where to start? I’m a middling engineer at best. I fully subscribe to my own pitch as a leader that engineers should prioritize simplicity and obviousness over performance and cleverness. That said, I have an obvious answer to “What is the most interesting problem you ever solved?” And just to be transparent and fair, I didn’t…