Engineering Leader and Open Source Advocate
I was standing in the lobby of my resort at Universal Orlando, waiting for an elevator, when the question caught me. Six cars, a small crowd, buttons lighting up faster than the doors could open. One car sailed past my floor without stopping. The other doubled back for someone who'd pressed down after I'd pressed up . And I found myself doing the thing I always do when something in the world won't…
For many developers, software projects never truly die - they just become harder and harder to touch. The code still exists; the ideas still matter; the content or functionality still has value. What disappears first is the ability to reasonably maintain that code. Over time, dependencies rot, build tools get abandoned, and the cognitive cost of even small changes steadily rises until the only…
Git has undoubtedly become one of the most important tools within any Web Developer's bag of tricks, arguably due to amazing success of GitHub . Unfortunately, Git can be quite overwhelming - particularly for those developers new to distributed version control systems. This complexity leads some developers to seek out graphical Git clients to assist them in managing their workflow correctly.…
I recently read Rob Conery's PHP or ASP.NET: Did I Do The Right Thing? Although it does a great job uncovering how a developer can literally lose half a decade of their life by focusing their efforts towards the wrong technologies, I can't help but feel as if Rob is still asking himself the wrong questions, focusing on symptoms rather than the problem itself. Toward the end of the article Rob…
Like many others, I incorporated a task runner (namely GruntJS ) into my workflow some time ago. If you tend to use "preprocessed languages" like CoffeeSript , LESS or Sass it's virtually a requirement in maintaining your sanity. Although I prefer sticking to vanilla JavaScript and CSS, introducing this step into my development cycle has certainly paid off in man-hours saved alone. Tasks such as…