Members Only Musings MSBuild, OutDir, Cargo Cults, and Why Nothing Is Ever Unchangeable MSBuild started it. Where it ended was with an idea that I am constantly being reminded of: nothing is ever unchangeable.
Members Only Musings Joining the Dark (Mode) Side After a great many years of resisting, it has finally happened. I have joined the dark side. I find your lack of faith disturbing...I had heard for years (mostly
Members Only Musings Be The Laziest Programmer You Can Be Be lazy. It's OK. Lazy programmers are GOOD programmers.
Members Only Blogging Developers, Blog More and Own Your Words Medium and HackerNoon are in the midst of a divorce: So HackerNoon is quietly leaving Medium, but also trying to take the rights for thousands of people's work
Members Only Musings Is Civility In Online Communities Dead? Not Yet. You cannot solve sociological problems with technological solutions. If civility is to win the day, then it must be both sides, elders and learners, promoting it.
Members Only Stories Confessions of a "Well, Actually..." Guy It was almost imperceptible. A slight shift in her gaze, a miniscule shake of her head, a flash behind her eyes. She knew, and then I understood. I had done it again.
Members Only Musings Technical Debt and the Rewrite-In-Place My group just finished up a massive year-and-a-half-long rewrite of a major project. I've blogged about events during this project several times before, from a stupid bug and a plea
Members Only Developers Life All Code Is Disposable, Just As It Should Be My recent post I Am a 9 to 5 Developer (And So Can You!) is getting WAY more traffic than I expected, and I am both humbled and excited that
Members Only Work/Life Balance I Am a 9 to 5 Developer (And So Can You!) I've been thinking quite a bit about a particular tweet from Safia Abdalla: A perhaps unpopular opinion (and a little ironic coming from me). You don’t have to write
Members Only Musings The New Guy Is A Better Coder Than Me, And That's Wonderful There's this new guy on our team. He's really smart. Probably smarter than me. Should I be worried about him trying to take my job?
Members Only Musings 8 Things Every New Programmer Should Know 1. It doesn't get easier; you get smarter. Programming is not a simple endeavor. Requirements change in the middle of projects; technology advances quickly and ruthlessly; customers are quick to
Members Only Teamwork Become Your Teammates' Rubber Duck You may be familiar with the term rubber duck debugging. This is the idea that in order to help a programmer solve a problem, s/he should explain it to
Members Only Musings How Much "Magic" Are We Comfortable With? Our Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) build system (that we recently implemented) is truly a joy to behold, but it's also basically magic from my perspective. Check some
Members Only Stories "I Don't Trust Anything That We Didn't Build" The problems started small, as they often do. But as we've seen many times before, lots of small problems in quick succession tend to make one big problem. In this
Members Only Musings In Praise of the Junior Developer "She's a project," my boss said to me. "She's green, and even though she's been working here for several months, you should consider her like a brand