Why do so many companies get it wrong? — I wrote this article in 2015 but never published it. This is the unedited draft. But I figure I might as well publish it now. As a software engineer, I’ve always had a fascination with process and workflow. It’s a fairly well-known fact that most developers have a huge desire…

This is part of my Little Things series. Imagine we are using an external service in a ruby app, probably a gem of some sort… require 'beerclient' beer_api_client = BeerAPIClient.new(API_KEY) beer_api_client.get_beers What’s wrong with this? We shouldn’t mock it, since we don’t own it. If we do mock it, our…

This week, I’ve had a bunch of students ask me for help. With at least four of them I’ve found myself going through an almost identical process: even though their problems were very different. The conversation went something like this… Student: So I’m trying to write this function that reverses…

This is part of my Little Things series. Although these examples are in ruby, they should be understandable to anyone familiar with an object-oriented language. What are value objects, and when should we use them? Let’s imagine that we have a some code that uses coordinates, and we’re defining a…

This is part of my Little Things series. Three years ago, I switched my shell from bash to zsh. Since then, I’ve added a bunch of stuff to my dotfiles and I’ve been getting increasingly annoyed that my shell is slow to load. Today, I opened a new tab in…

This is part of my Little Things series. If you’ve ever written a test in RSpec, you’ve probably used this syntax for expectations: expect(email).to be_truthy How does it work, though? Can we replicate this with some simple ruby? It’s actually not that complicated. …

I’ve always used Medium to publish reasonably long-form articles, but while reading through Andy Croll’s One Ruby Thing posts the other day It struck me that… I don’t write much these days. I have a whole load of tiny little tips and notes sat in Evernote which I could share. I don’t share them because turning them into proper articles requires too much effort. So I’ve decided to start sharing them on here, with the following rules:

At CharlieHR, we use a rebase and merge strategy to deploy our code. A few months back we started to have problems synchronizing our merges, and ended up using a Slack channel and some simple rules to solve it. In general, our process looks something like this: an engineer makes…

Scrum defines the Definition of Done in pretty simple terms: it’s the acceptance criteria that are common to every single user story. For scrum teams, it’s really important to have a solid definition of what “done” means. They work in sprints, and need some way of deciding whether a user…