walls.corpus

By Nathan L. Walls

Reading and Learning: May 17, 2015

Sunday, 17 May, 2015 — learning improvement

A fair amount of reading and podcast listening since the last entry in mid-April. Since putting together a small tool to pull reading information out of Instapaper, these sorts of posts have become much easier to pull together.

My goal is to automate them further using a Rails application I’m building. The application’s aim is to reduce the friction of recording what technical/technical culture material I’ve read and podcasts I’ve listened to. More on that later.

Here’s the latest log:

Articles and books

I read the following:

I am proud to be one of the 17 founders/authors of the The Agile Manifesto back in 2001. I think it provided a jolt of energy, hope of a better way of doing things, of creating software and making the world work better. It was a pivotal turning point.

But in the 14 years since then, we‘ve lost our way. The word “agile” has become sloganized; meaningless at best, jingoist at worst. We have large swaths of people doing “flaccid agile,” a half-hearted attempt at following a few select software development practices, poorly. We have scads of vocal agile zealots—as per the definition that a zealot is one who redoubles their effort after they’ve forgotten their aim.

At Wiredrive, we do a fair amount of code reviews. I had never done one before I started here so it was a new experience for me. I think it’s a good idea to…

What object-oriented programming advice is this code violating? Note: please just answer this in your head, not in the…

Lately I’ve become increasingly sensitive to how little time I have left to learn new technologies. It’s not that I’m nearing death: I’m not, at least not by…

There it was, right in my inbox: If you go ahead and make those changes, we’ll come on board and send you a check for $75,000. 75 grand was a buncha cash for…

Programmers love to discuss interviewing programmers. And hate to discuss it. Interviewing touches the very heart of human social interaction: It’s a process…

As a developer, you spend 90% of your time on code-related activities like reading and maintaining existing code. With such a large chunk of time spent on these…

The end of the beginning, and the beginning of the end It was January, and the weather was fucking bleak. It’d been freezing and overcast for as long as I could…

Of course Facebook doesn’t “edit” NewsFeed in the same way that a newspaper editor once edited the front page. It’s a very different way. That’s why we’re…

Recruiters are not my most favorite people in the tech eco-system. They’re the people that will contact you on behalf of some client (the company that pays…

This is a simple web application for a group of employees to find out their average salary without exposing any individual salary information to anyone in the group, or storing any private information on the server.

ShellCheck is a static analysis and linting tool for sh/bash scripts. It’s mainly focused on handling typical beginner and intermediate level syntax errors and…

This is a simple web application for a group of employees to find out their average salary without exposing any individual salary information to anyone in the…

Today we are announcing our intent to phase out non-secure HTTP. There’s pretty broad agreement that HTTPS is the way forward for the web.  In recent months,…

When I started on the Firebird team at Bazaarvoice, I was happy to learn that they host their code on GitHub and review and land changes via pull requests. I…

Is software antifragile? I think so. I recently finished the book Antifragile – Things that Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I liked it a lot, and…

I’ll never forget the first time I used the World Wide Web. It was in the early 1990s. I was in America visiting my girlfriend (now wife) at her college in Massachusetts. This was before Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, was released. There were no images on the web, but I was still stunned by the scope of what I experienced. Even back then, the web seemed limitless, without edges. That Encarta CD-ROM sitting next to the computer suddenly seemed pathetically constrained.

In her new book No One Understands You and What To Do About It , Heidi Grant Halvorson tells readers a story about her friend, Tim. When Tim started a new job…

Here is my list of heuristics and rules of thumb for software development that I have found useful over the years: Development 1. Start small, then extend.…

Shannon Liss-Riordan rolls a small black suitcase out of the ugly federal courthouse in San Francisco. She’s smiling, just a fraction. No wonder: She just won a little victory against Uber.

You didn’t mean to end up here. You didn’t even see it coming. It all started with a chance to earn a living doing something you loved. Your dream job. Creating…

Podcasts

I listened to the following:

For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post

Reading and Learning: April 20, 2015

Monday, 20 April, 2015 — learning improvement

For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post

Oh goodness, this is a big one. I can explain. Work has been busier and I’ve spent more time of late really wanting to not do things manually. Witness all of the TextExpander work I’ve done in previous editions of “Tool Sharpening.”

I simply refused to keep a list of articles read manually, so I waited until I wrote a tool to pull the contents of an RSS feed from Instapaper and write it out as a Markdown file. After completing another home project last week, I had time to write the first iteration of that tool, and so, I was able to quickly pull things I’ve read for the last few weeks easily.

As the tool expands, I expect to be able to make these sorts of posts more frequent and, as such, more digestible.

Articles and books

I read the following:

We’ve been paying closer attention lately to how we use design patterns in our Ruby on Rails work. Decorators have emerged as one pattern that’s helped us keep…

Since leaving SocialChorus I have been doing an odd combination of management consulting and on the ground software design consulting. I have been doing what I…

Rome wasn’t built in a day is one of those adages freely dispensed by motivational posters and chatty grandparents, which makes it just as easy to freely…

Last year in one of my conference talks, I mentioned that I have kids. After my talk, a woman came up to me and asked me how I do it. How I have a full-time job…

My hands were shaking…I could barely breathe I had just finished the first one-one-one coding assessment in my six-month coding bootcamp and it had not gone as…

Let’s say you want to delete a method foo that seems to be dead code. You use a tool like grep to find callers of foo, and there are no results. It’s tempting…

On March 27 The following message was posted on the official GitHub blog: We are currently experiencing the largest DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack…

I’d been meaning to write this up for a while, and now Nat Pryce has written up the 140 character version . I “write” a Call Option when I sell someone the…

Let’s say you have some code whose intent is clear to you but you can see a world where someone else may be confused. Often after writing such code, you realize…

Were software engineer a profession like doctor or lawyer, we’d have a strong and binding set of ethics. I note that the ACM publishes a code of ethics. Here’s…

Brent Simmons has a good post today on ethics for programmers: Were software engineer a profession like doctor or lawyer, we’d have a strong and binding set of…

This checklist is comprised of 48 items you can use to gauge the maturity of your software delivery competency, and form a baseline to measure your future…

I am lucky enough to work with a small team of fantastic engineers who truly care about their customers. If you are not that lucky, this letter is for you to…

The hardest part of advising Ph.D. students is teaching them how to write. Fortunately, I’ve seen patterns emerge over the past couple years. So, I’ve decided…

If you’re using Git, you’re probably using pull requests. They’ve been around in some form or other since the dawn of DVCS. Back before Bitbucket and GitHub…

Screencasts and presentations

I watched or attended the following:

Podcasts

I listened to the following:

fin

Tool Sharpening: March 11, 2015

Wednesday, 11 March, 2015 — development improvement

I’m presenting Intermediate Git on March 31. It’s a one-day, hands-on workshop to build skills from beginner to intermediate with Git on the command line. Cost: $449. You can register here.

Environment + Process tweaks

I separated “Reading and Learning” posts from “Tool Sharpening” posts, as I mentioned I was going to do. These are separate concerns and they’ll be easier to make both types of post separately. My expectation is I’ll have roughly twice as many Reading and Learning posts as Tool Sharpening posts.

Also, with my new gig, I’m a lot more comfortable working on a Pull Request model. Even if I’m the only person working on a project, it’s still good process reinforcement. I’m also using a rebase model. I’ve never cared for merge commits. Conversely, reducing a feature branch to one or two very descriptive commits feels pretty good. I’ll use small commits in the moment when I’m taking small steps to implement a feature. Once I finish the feature, those small steps lose their utility. They become noise. The Pull Request model lets me strip away that noise and tell the larger story about what the commit is doing and why its there.

I also:

  • Adjusted the TextExpander shortcuts I use to generate much of each podcast line to account for wording changes I’ve made
  • Refactored my TextExpander shortcuts for podcasts to create the Markdown link for podcasts with a predictable URL structure, which thankfully, is most of the ones I listen to
    • A further refactoring to do is to transition to a single TextExpander shortcut that calls a Ruby script with which I could retrieve the show notes page and grab the episode title
    • This would allow me to more quickly scrobble the podcasts I listen to, even though there’s not a direct way to get the information out of Overcast.
  • Created some TextExpander shortcuts for fitness and exercise
  • I added some additional Composure shell commands for Git
    • grbc is git rebase --continue
      • Useful for resolving conflicts on a merge or, more likely with the way I work, a rebase before a merge
    • gmt is git mergetool
      • Get me into merge conflict resolution as quickly as possible
    • fbc is git push origin :$1 && git branch -d $1 and allows me to clean-up a feature branch after I’ve merged it to master
      • E.g. fbc nlw-new-feature
      • fbc stands for feature branch cleanup
    • gsu is git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/$1 $1
      • Useful for when I’m working with another developer on a feature branch I started and pushed, but now need to pull changes the other develoer made on the feature branch

Project work

  • Moved Accomplished over to GitHub and fixed up the initial batch of tests
  • Set-up a new Digital Ocean server ($10 credit for using the link) that this blog will eventually be migrated to. Outside of the initial machine creation and user addition, I’ll be doing as much of the set-up and management that I can through Ansible

For some more background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post.

Reading and Learning: Feb. 24, 2015

Tuesday, 24 February, 2015 — learning improvement

For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post

Alright, I let this one go too long. The articles list is incomplete, but to help clear a giant backlog….

Articles and books read

Screencasts and presentations watched

Podcasts listed to

Tool Sharpening: Jan 1, 2015

Thursday, 1 January, 2015 — development improvement

For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post

Environment + Process tweaks

I added several zsh aliases for some Git actions that are becoming more common for me, when working on feature branches

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alias gsl='git stash list'
alias gssv='git stash save'
alias gss='git stash show'
alias gssp='git stash show -p'
alias gsp='git stash pop'

These are particularly useful when I’m in the middle of work on a repository and I want to do anything else, like run a git bisect or examine another branch.

Another use case I have is searching, with find or with ag, then opening resulting files in BBEdit.

A typical case looks like this:

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ag -l foo -print0 | xargs bbedit

In this example, any file in the current directory or below containing the term ‘foo’ will be opened in BBEdit. The find version is very similar for cases when I want to open all files with a name containing ‘foo’.

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find . -name '2014*' -print | xargs bbedit

Rather than type these commands out every time, I want to type a much shorter command and the search string, like so:

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bbf foobar

or

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bbg foobar

It would be easiest for me, by experience, to implement each of these in Ruby or Perl. Instead, I chose to implement these as zsh shell functions. I used Erich Smith’s Composure shell library to build the functions. The resulting code looks like this:

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# author, about, param, example and group are Composure functions
# ag is the Silver Searcher (brew install ag)
bbf () {
    author 'Nathan L. Walls'
    about 'Function to find files matching a term and open them in BBEdit'
    param '1: Term to search for via `find . -name`'
    example 'bbf 2014*'
    group 'utility'

    find . -name '$*' -print | to_bbedit
}

bbg () {
    author 'Nathan L. Walls'
    about 'Func. to open files containing a term in BBEdit'
    param '1: Term to search for via `ag -l`'
    example 'bbg foo'
    group 'utility'

    ag -l $* -print0 | to_bbedit
}

to_bbedit () {
    author 'Nathan L. Walls'
    about 'Func. to open files in BBEdit through xargs, via a pipe'
    param 'None, implied to come through xargs'
    example 'ls | to_bbedit'
    group 'utility'

    xargs bbedit
}

One other use case I have for this sort of thing doesn’t even require opening files, necessarily, and that’s seeing what files I have that have the word “focus” within them, except spec_helper.rb, in my Ruby projects. This way, I can keep from committing code with focus: true in place and save myself the step of rerunning tests and amending a commit. That looks like this:

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alias foc='ag -l focus --ignore spec_helper.rb

Or, at least it did until I thought about it a little more and wanted to make it a function as well. Now, it looks like this, instead:

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foc () {
    author 'Nathan L. Walls'
    about "Find errant 'focus: true' statements before committing"
    param 'None'
    example 'foc'
    group 'testing'

    ag -l 'focus: true' --ignore spec_helper.rb
}

Why not use an alias here? Partly because I’m enjoying using Composure and partly because I believe I might make further use of this foc () function elsewhere.

There’s still a bit more I could do with these functions, namely adding some error checking, but these will get the job done for me well enough.

I also:

  • Tweaked BBEdit 11 settings to limit the scope of clippings used for given languages, which keeps me from getting cross-language clipping pollution. In my case, there was a large set of PHP clippings coming up when I was looking for Ruby clippings. And now, I’m not
  • Found a way to Save All open documents in BBEdit, Cmd-Opt-S
  • Added TextExpander shortcuts related to writing Git commit messages
  • Updated my work machine to the dotfiles set-up I highlighted in the previous tool-sharpening entry
  • Created a Cider profile to get my Homebrew set-up into source control
  • Updated Git to address a Mac OS X vulnerability

Project work

  • No project work since the last entry

Skill improvements

See above regarding working with Composure to write shell functions. Overall, I’m finding Composure a really nice little framework for iterating over commands quickly and making them understandable later. It was starting to write these commands and then trying to remember Smith’s presentation at Triangle Ruby Brigade back in August 2014 about Composure that led to my coworker Steve finding Smith’s lightning talk.