My company recently migrated everyone from Gmail to Outlook, and I found myself disliking staring at my new email client. I was similarly heartbroken when Google discontinued Inbox and I was forced to go back to clunky old Gmail. So this time, I took matters into my own hands. I…

Say this is you, and you’re trying to decide what to get for lunch.

Software teams like shipping software. We like doing it fast, and doing it well. We like to avoid making mistakes when doing so — especially costly or time-consuming ones. My team wanted to optimize for these values with automated feedback mechanisms in place. Enter: ship-it — a script developed by…

Developing your own method of stubbing REST calls in code is a neat way to get around dependencies on Mockito, WireMock, or other stubbing libraries, giving developers more control over their mocks, spies, and stubs for unit testing. Say you have a repository that makes a REST request using Spring’s…

A comic about collaboration. — Recently, I saw a comic about interrupting developers making its rounds among the Twitter programming community. The more I saw it, the more I thought about how little it reflected my own experiences in programming. This comic attempts to capture my own experiences with interruptions — a usually-seamless flow from…

I’m a software engineer who lives and breathes Agile and Extreme Programming. I’m also a writer and will be participating this coming November, not for the first time, in NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. …

I created a museum exhibit for my AHS Capstone entitled “Humans and Tests”, which explored the system of standardized testing in US K-12 education. This is a photo tour of the final exhibit. At the entrance, a sign with the exhibit title welcomed you: Looking beyond the sign, you could…

Disclaimer: this metaphor only extends so far. I do not really recommend starting to attribute your students alignments. For all the people who didn’t spend college evenings playacting wizards, a quick intro: In a Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) game, there are several players, and one Dungeon Master (DM) who guides…

I do it all. Fitbit for activity tracking, SleepBot for sleep tracking, MyFitnessPal for nutrition tracking, Financius for spending tracking. RescueTime for tracking all the time I spend looking at all these other trackers. I avidly watch my Audible stats (and I wish Audible offered more). I spent way too…