Recently for whatever reason, my latest YouTube binge has been Smithsonian Channel’s airplane crash investigation documentary series. Each episode details a particular incident, then reconstructs the sequence of events that led to the crash, and how the investigators pieced it together. An airplane is a very complex machine, just like…

Have you ever done this when you have a relatively large applicaton, or one that uses lots of symbolic links in a build? ‘git status’ YUGE listing of 100+ files What if I want to git checkout maybe the 2nd, 9th, and 20th items in that list? And being lazy programmers, how do I do it in the shortest amount of keystrokes? Facebook Path Picker (fpp) is a dead-simple command line utility that’s perfect for a scenario like this.

I’m always looking for some sort of command line workflow improvement — oh-my-zsh is great in its auto-completion plugins for many programs, but I recently discovered its counterpart, zsh-syntax-highlighting. I always have this problem that I fat finger some prefix, to get the infamous ‘command not found’. However, with syntax highlighting, it checks the $PATH dynamically so I can see if I’m about to fat finger a command.

A colleague once remarked: “This guy! Lives in the browser.” Guilty as charged. I spend a lot of time in the Chrome Developer Tools debugging scripts, looking at why resources aren’t loading fast, and getting pixel perfection for UI components. …

Have you ever heard this: “I really enjoyed reading that API’s documentation — it was well organized, with detailed, well-explained examples in our language of choice.” If so, I envy you. More often, this is the typical experience. [Google a specific error] [Top result: Stack Overflow. Some person has explained…

“I have to do WHAT to start the application?!” Sadly, this is the reaction of a lot of developers on their first day on the job. Tasked with “getting the new guy set up” you may launch a disjointed effort of pointing through old documentation, filling in knowledge gaps, and…

The difference in work environment between front end and back end developers scales with the size of the organization. Medium to large organizations have dedicated back-end developers and similarly, dedicated front-end developers. In the last three years with the explosion in NodeJS and isomorphic/universal JavaScript, more business logic is being…

Previously, I’ve discussed the role of DevOps in agile organizations, and release management, but have not discussed very much the development and project-oriented management aspect of an agile organization. Agile gets the perception as having little management overhead, and that is true. However, there is still management to be done…

“We do agile” Are we really “doing agile”? Or, are we imitators, placing a fine veneer over top an otherwise dated development and delivery methodology? Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about organizational process and the path to continuous delivery. …