Having grown up in rural Southern U.S.A, I was raised among family in which there were 2 prevalent professions apart from the obvious one (farming)— they were teaching and preaching.
Have you ever been using your favorite IDE or perhaps the stand-alone code editor you fire up day-to-day and accidentally chosen a menu option that you had known was there but had never explored, only to have its usefulness blow your mind?Or…
I gave a talk on this past Wednesday at TechExpo, the local annual tech conference here in Tallahassee. It was an overview of version control systems, their use in individual and team…
As a child I was an advanced reader. A lack of athletic interest and a kindergarten teacher interested in early reading development contributed to what turned into a rather odd situation. The small-town school I attended was K-12, resulting in a very limited…
This is the third in a series regarding my experiences in dropping the use of an IDE for my day-to-day programming tasks. For some background, you may want to check out my initial post where I lay out my plans and the post covering Days 1 &…
A few weeks ago, I posted an entry speculating on the effects of the use of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) on programming skills and productivity. At the end of December, a colleague of mine and I decided to give coding…
I can’t deny that most of my programming career has been supported by one or more Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) helping me along. In fact, it was only my early coding days back in the ’90s when I was using Perl in a Linux environment that I…
Maybe it’s the English major in me — yes, I came into software development through the “back door” of web publishing back in the 90’s as a writer, not an ordained computer science or IT major — but I am often struck by how much words matter when you’re developing software. I’m also often surprised how…
I gave a talk today at TalTech Alliance’s monthly session, sharing my ideas about Above Average Programmers and why someone might want to be one. The presentation is the polar opposite of what I had originally envisioned I would give, focusing on the…
In the quest to become Above Average, it’s easy to give in to the temptation to do everything yourself. What better way to prove you’re better than average by doing everything yourself, right? Just one problem: It’s a trap! And it’s one some coders never escape. The plain…
