Should you actually deploy your app every merge? — It seems like continuous deployment is what all DevOps teams shoot for. Every merge to master should go right into the customer’s hands. The code should be heavily tested with smoke, unit, and integration tests, put through staging environments, and then put out into the wild with a magic pipeline. …

Slow down before picking the newest framework — The first project I ever worked on professionally was an Angular 1.0 project. It was supposed to be a rewrite of a very old system. I didn’t know anything about anything, but the task to build a full-stack web application was put upon my team. …

How to handle on-call. Don’t worry, everything will be fine — So shit hit the fan and you are out of toilet paper. And the fan is still blowing. And the plug welded into the wall. And everyone knows it was you. Now what? Well, as the roll suggests, the first thing you need to do is not panic. These things…

Is Software Development the Perfect Job? — It’s 2020. You are a software developer working for a multi-billion-dollar company. You stare deeply into your MacBook screen. You are writing one line of code, but you are thinking about the next 1000. You have a mental dependency graph of the entire system you are working on. You deeply…

Stop writing code and start reading about it — I find myself writing a lot of code. And certainly writing code gets you better at writing code. I mean, you don’t become a professional athlete by learning woodworking. In the same vein, you don’t become a professional programmer by reading books alone. You have to write code. I owe…

It’s actually not serverless at all — The word serverless is really misleading. It’s a buzzword, for sure. If you google “serverless,” the Wikipedia definition is actually pretty good: “Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider runs the server, and dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Pricing is based on…

How to keep meetings at a minimum. — MAJOR DISCLAIMER: I hate meetings. Not an uncommon idea. But I really hate them. And I can count on one hand the number of meetings I have called. Not bragging, but its got to be a record. Luckily, my day to day involves very few meetings. The team I work…

Your code is not your product. — My product manager and I once got into a debate about whether we should ever work on code that isn’t customer-facing or customer affecting. This means cleaning up tech debt or refactoring. I argued that there are certain problems that should be addressed that don’t necessarily face the customer right…

A better solution for hardcoded numbers — I really dislike the phrase magic number. I see so many people get it wrong. I have seen and had multiple code reviews where someone sees any digits in code and comments, “Oh this is a magic number, make sure you put it up top with a name.” (I also…