When preparing feature development work, I write Gherkin-style tickets, which follow the “Given/When/Then” format. Many people call these stories, and I do, too. This technique is incredibly effective! But why? In this post, I’ll try to answer that question. ...
I’ve been lucky to have worked with some great engineers, and one thing that they tend to do exceptionally well is reporting about their work at meetings. Today I’d like to summarize what I think makes a great standup report. ...
Bugs are part of software. Reporting bugs well is a necessary skill in an ever-growing number of job titles. In this post, I’d like to explain how to write a perfect bug report and offer some bug-reporting best practices. ...
Screenshots of code are common in developer communication, but they come with real drawbacks. Here’s why I try to avoid them. ...
When building a demo application, I believe you can often skip authentication. ...
Me: Hey, I’m experiencing an issue with your software. Here’s a detailed bug report. SAAS Engineer: What you’re describing isn’t possible. Narrator: But it was possible. This is a frustrating, unproductive snippet of a conversation I’ve had a few times in my career. What can we learn? Treat bug reports like gold. ...
A user opened an issue in Tilex last week that I spent a significant amount of time thinking about and talking about (thanks JB) before responding to. Here’s the truncated request: May I ask you to compile a step-by-step list to set up a running TIL instance? ...
I’ve been giving technical talks for a few years, and I’m speaking at the Vim Chicago Meetup next month about integrating React with Vim. In this post, I’m going to use that opportunity as an excuse to document my speaking process. ...
I created this blog to reflect on my code and development as a programmer. In that spirit, I’d like to make a pitch to anybody reading: you should blog. ...
Sigils are a mechanism for working with textual representations in Elixir. If you’ve ever made an array of Strings in Ruby with %w(), the API is similar. A neat feature of sigils is that we can make custom variants, or override existing Kernel variants. The latter is generally discouraged. ...