There are activities — other than programming on client work — that are key parts of working in the software industry. If you work for a software company and you want to do, e.g. Ember.js work, you should be: Going to local Javascript meetups (networking, public speaking) Reading and writing JS blogs (professional development, technical […]
Better Testing in Go With Gocheck
As a quick reminder, golang is a really fun programming language to use. It even includes testing out of the box! Unfortunately, this out-of-the-box testing framework isn’t all that great. It lacks the syntactic sugar of mature frameworks like rspec or gtest. Of course, there are alternatives. I found an open-source library (licensed with Simplified […]
Can you measure “quality”? (spoiler – yes you can!)
There are 3 main questions that I need to be able to answer in order to monitor a project. How many “thingies” can we get done each iteration? – a.k.a. Velocity yep, “thingies” is a technical term…the units of measure are neither man-days nor gummy-bears…they are just thingies how long will it take me to […]
BoilerMake: A Weekend of Hacks, Hackers, and Dodgeball or a New-aged Career Fair?
I went to my first university-based hackathon: BoilerMake. A hackathon is straight forward, but BoilerMake was no simple hackathon. Students from across the country came together to build something/anything in one weekend. Projects ranged from modifying household electronics (microwaves that can respond to text messages, and robotic vacuum cleaners that can lay dominoes in a pattern), […]
Android, Robotium and Spoon: A Practical Guide for Testing on Android Devices
Developing for Android is a lot of fun. It has actually become a niche for me here at SEP. Android has changed quite a bit over the past 3 years since I first started hacking on it – action bars, more screen sizes, and probably the biggest addition…fragments. But one thing certainly has not changed. […]
Lighting up Continuous Feedback…
Co-worker 1: “Hey…is our Jenkins even running?” Me: “Uhh, yes? What do you mean?” CW1: “Well, I’ve pushed 3 different commits, and it hasn’t told me that the build failed.” Me: “Neat. Good job not breaking the build?” CW1: “Oh wait, Jenkins only notifies us when it fails, that’s right.” Me: “Right…but it would be […]
Lean/Agile Pay It Forward
We have a Pay It Forward Program here at SEP, where we get $50 from the company to do something nice in this season of giving. It can’t go to friends or family; it can’t be just another charitable donation to a .org. Many Pay It Forward participants have bought cups of coffee for strangers, […]
Curiosity as a tool
SEP has asked us to write about the tools of our trade. I’m a software engineer at a decently-sized software engineering company, so it’s pretty clear that I have several tools in my programming toolbox. Things like Sublime Text for scripting, DiffMerge for file diffs, Stackoverflow for Q&A and community, and even music for getting in the zone. But there’s one tool I […]
The Design Eye — Tool of the Designer Trade
One of the innate talents of a good designer in any design industry is having a good eye for design. But what does it mean to have a good eye for design? It’s one of those things that is hard to put into words. It’s part instinct that has been developed based on years of […]
