No not the architectural style (although I am a fan), I’m talking about taking a break once in a while. I’ve already talked about how churning out work isn’t everything, but it seems like a good time for a reminder. Actually, the ideal time for a reminder would have been last Monday, but I didn’t come up with the idea for this post until last Sunday and it seemed hypocritical to write about.. Read More
Haven’t finished your Christmas shopping yet? Haven’t started? A really convenient last minute gift is giving to charity in your gift-getter’s name. CharityWatch has a great list of trustworthy charities and GiveWell will give your donations directly to the charities that they’ve found to be the most effective. Or you could just go to the liquor store if you’re not worried about looking classy ;)
For anyone who wants to be a better coder, whether you’re just starting out or have years of experience, Saron Yitbarek’s talk Learning Code Good has a ton of great tips.
So it turns out there are a lot of keynotes I like, and one of them is from Keep Ruby Weird 2015 by Sandi Metz. Fair warning, parts of that talk hard to listen to – she plays recordings from an old psychological experiment that would absolutely never pass ethical review today. However, even if you skip that part (she warns you when the hard bits are coming up), there are.. Read More
Hey nerds are you taking care of yourselves? Check out this great list of self care resources for devs and others. Even if you already feel good, it’s worth taking a look at. I mean, it wouldn’t exactly be terrible if you felt even better now would it ;)
I really enjoyed this keynote from PyCon 2015 by Jacob Kaplan-Moss and I think you will too. He makes a really great point in particular about how statistically, the vast majority of us are average programmers. That’s why they call it average! As much as we’d all like to be amazing programmers, I find something really comforting in knowing that realistically, I’m a perfectly normal programmer and so are you, particularly.. Read More
We talk all the time about how often code is read vs written and how important it is to be good at reading code, but I’ve hardly ever seen anyone talk about how to get good at reading code. This excellent slide deck by Josh Matthews called How to Read Unfamiliar Code is one of the only times I’ve ever seen anyone even address learning how to read unfamiliar code, and it has a great.. Read More
One of the hardest parts of programming is when you’re just starting out and don’t even know the word for what you want to google. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a list of all the words and phrases you needed to know to even ask an intelligible question? Of course it would be unspeakably boring to read but that’s beside the point :) If you’re interested in functional.. Read More
One of many things nerds like to spend far too much time debating is whether or not to comment their code. On one hand, comments make code a lot easier to understand, but on the other, many people claim that good code is self-documenting. If you haven’t been writing code professionally for long, it probably seems totally obvious that comments help you understand code you’re new to or haven’t looked.. Read More
What even is a container? If you don’t know either, check out Julia Evans‘ post! Docker’s explanation of containers isn’t terrible, but I personally got a lot more out of Julia’s. I recommend the rest of her blog too, she has this really great friendly way of explaining things.