Exercism is a tool that lets you download and solve practice problems in over 30 different languages. I mentioned it in passing before, but let’s talk more about why it’s great. First of all, each problem in Exercism has a set of unit tests, so you don’t have to wonder if you’re doing it right, you can just run the tests and know for sure. The tests are also great for.. Read More
Testing! Getting better at testing will make you seem like a better programmer even if your coding style doesn’t change at all. No matter how beautiful and clear your code is, if it’s full of bugs it’s not good code. It’s kind of ironic that I’m writing a post about testing because honestly I’m not very good at it. Better than I used to be, especially since I started working at.. Read More
I’m not sure what possessed them to do it, but someone wrote a micro webframework in gnu COBOL. There’s even a github repo if you’d like to run it yourself. I love how weird projects can get when programmers build something just because they can.
Back in part 1 I talked about how important it is to make sure you understand the problem you’re trying to solve. Today I want to expand on that because there’s much more to problem solving. Having a great understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve is great, but it’s not always enough. Sometimes you’re wrong about what the problem actually is. No matter how well you understand the problem you think.. Read More
Julia Evans has a great guide to asking good questions, you should read it :) Asking good questions is such a useful skill, I wish programming education spent more time on it. Getting really good at asking questions is also a great hack for looking like a better developer (it’ll also help you actually become better, but in the short term it’s a good hack). When you ask a bad question,.. Read More
A while ago I wrote about how hash maps work, but something’s been bugging me. How does the hash function do its thing? I know hash functions make variable length data into fixed length data but how do they do that? To be clear I’m interested in the kind of hash you would use for a hash map, you would definitely want a more secure hash to keep your passwords safe. Thanks.. Read More
This post titled How I Ruined Office Productivity With a Face-Replacing Slack Bot (Without Really Knowing What I Was Doing) has been floating around the internets lately so you may have already seen it. Even if you have, it’s an interesting example of how a programmer breaks down a new problem and experiments with the pieces before putting it all together. I especially like how that post shows the tiny experiments Jason started.. Read More
One of the most common misconceptions I’ve heard about programming is that you have to be a math whiz to be a good programmer. I’ve mentioned this before but I want to attack that particular stereotype more directly. It is true that there are similarities between math and programming – programming uses some math terms like function and variable, it’ll be a lot easier to get things onto the screen if you.. Read More
Willpower is a big deal when you’re doing an inherently difficult and frustrating task like programming. It’s also something we tend to assume we either have or we don’t, but there are actually a lot of things we can do to improve our chances of making it through a willpower challenge whether that’s making yourself write boring documentation or resisting the urge to screw around on reddit all afternoon instead.. Read More
Check it out, I’m part of Sravanti Tekumalla’s collection of interviews with programmers called Always Be Improving: Curating Developer Experiences (I bet you can guess what they’re about :) )