Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

How Do I Write Good Code?

Eric Dietrich, over at DaedTech, explains how he writes good code.  It’s a post worth a read in full, but here is a summary:

  • Make it easy to change
  • Make it really readable
  • Make it work
  • Make it elegant
  • Learn from accomplished practitioners

He is also listing a few books to learn from (the Amazon links are those of Eric – I have no idea if they are affiliated or not, but if they are, he’ll get the credit, like he deserves):

Analyzing 2+ Million Travis Builds

TravisCI – a continuous integration service – shares some of the insights from over 2,000,000 builds they’ve run, in an blog post called “What We Learned about Continuous Integration from Analyzing 2+ Million Travis Builds“.  For me, the most valuable bit is about the reasons for failing builds, which clearly indicates the need for and the importance of unit, integration, and UI tests:

2016-07-28-analyzing-travis-builds-0

Around 20% of all builds fail.  There is a variation based on the language – for some programming languages, testing is part of the process and culture – for others it’s an acquired tool.  Once you do implement testing, most of your builds will run.  You’ll cancel very few.  But about 20% will fail due to failed unit tests, configurations, or environment setups.  Catching these 20% before it hits production is super important.

Pull Request focused dashboards for BitBucket

PR-focused-dashboard

A few days ago BitBucket announced the re-worked dashboards, which are now much more focused on the Pull Requests that you’ve created or need to review, rather than lists of repositories that you have access to.  I’ve enabled the feature for my team and it looks super awesome!

If you’ve been suffering from being lost in dozens or hundreds of projects and missing out on the Pull Requests activity, check them out.  You’d be surprised.

Classic Programmer Paintings

Classic Programmer Paintings is a hilarious resource with classic paintings featured with modern captions from the programming world.

"Gentle technical discussion on IRC channel", Francisco Goya, Oil on canvas, 1814
“Gentle technical discussion on IRC channel”,
Francisco Goya, Oil on canvas, 1814

Well worth adding the RSS feed to your geek humor collection…

Found via Andrey Vystavkin.