Here’s my annual professional review covering 2020.

I’ve been learning a bit of Python this Fall to facilitate conversations with a mentee. In this post, I’m going to share the first Python function I’ve ever written, a solution to the Exercism challenge ‘Raindrops’.

There is a glut of programming information online. You can’t read it all, and you shouldn’t, because much of it is outdated, wrong, or irrelevant to you.

So, what is the signal in this noise? I recommend aggregators, blogs, pair programming. And I offer a gentle recommendation against tutorials.

I love Vim. Folks who’ve programmed with me, or attended a Vim Meetup when I was an organizer, can attest. When I was learning to code, getting fast at Vim changed everything for me. After almost a decade using this editor, here are my personal configurations.

Programming is a new and abstract field, and so we place great emphasis on ideas. When I find one that sticks with me, I end up sharing it again and again. These are some of my favorites.

I’ve been working on a development roadmap for my projects, and wanted to share my process. Consider this my recipe to turn an idea into software.

Here’s a familiar scenario: you open a new terminal, and before the prompt appears, you see the following.

You have new mail.

What’s going on here?

I’m working on a team where we keep a clone of the development branch (the main place where work is done), used to deploy to a QA environment. The benefits of this branching technique are:

• clone is isolated from work
• It’s easy to tell what was deployed to QA– clone is the source of truth

Unused dependencies are bad: they increase the size of your project, slow down your processes, require upgrades, and send incorrect messages to fellow developers about what’s important. Make your project better by periodically auditing your dependencies, and removing those that are unused.

Here’s my annual professional review covering 2018.