[dev] posts

TLDR: upskilling on ensuring you "build the right thing" is just as, if not more important than upskilling on "build the thing right". We need to be experts in building the right thing, the right way. STLDR: prototyping and using a whiteboard effectively are superpowers In some martial arts, a black belt is considered the point at which you know ...

It's sometimes useful exposing a web server running on your local machine to the big World Wide Web. Why? There are a bunch of services around that need to be able to access your website in order to analyse it For example, maybe you are doing some SEO or checking HTML validation, and exposing your local server means you can make a change and it is ...

I strongly believe that ignorance is one of the most powerful tools we should employ when we build software. As a mechanism to enforce de-coupling it is great. What?! Huh?! No, I haven't lost the plot (any more than usual), I simply mean that I strive to build small components that are as ignorant as possible. The opposite of ignorance is knowled ...

If you are using ClojureScript (and if not, why not? :-)) then I strongly recommend you enable parallel build. I mistakenly thought this meant that it would run separate builds in parallel, but no, it is far cleverer a ...

ag is great and searches through your code base in the blink of an eye. Coupled with helm it makes for a great experience finding things. If run in a git project then it helpfully ignores those in your .gitignore file. However, in most projects I have f ...

I see a lot of code bases getting into a mess through an inappropriate use of abstraction. Like many things in the Software Engineering industry, it is a tool which is in wide-spread use, learned from poor examples and not particularly well understood. For me, the best definition of an abstraction, and I apologise for not crediting whoever coined ...

Another quick tip. I use the excellent cljsbuild to compile and test our ClojureScript projects (and I can't believe how difficult it is to wire this stuff together in 2016!). To support continuous integration I use phantomjs to provide the JavaScript environment. Unfortunat ...

Projectile is an excellent library for managing 'projects' (where a project is typically a git repository). Today I found a new tip - projectile-kill-buffers which effectively removes the project from your current emacs session: projectile-kill-buffers is an interactive autoloaded compiled Lisp fu ...

I need to write a much longer post to explain my thoughts on 'versioning' and what constitutes a release with today's trends of continuous integration, but for now, a simple tip. I wanted a way to distinguish each build, not each release but each build. There is one excellent source of truth for that which is your git repository. Wouldn't i ...

I need to write a much longer post to explain my thoughts on 'versioning' and what constitutes a release with today's trends of continuous integration, but for now, a simple tip. I wanted a way to distinguish each <span class="underline">build</span>, not each <span class="underline">release</span> but each <span class="underline">build</span>. Th ...

A hard day I learned the following lessons today:  Simplest is best Evaluate your assumptions Sometimes development is just hard...