It’s interesting how learning is sometimes like travel. At the end of the journey, you end up back where you started, only with a broadened perspective. Trivial example: code comments. When I was new to programming I commented my code extensively. If I’m honest, it was to compensate for my difficulties in reading code. A …
To show a specific selection of your posts in the sidebar, contrary to what some top-ranking search results will tell you, you don’t need to install yet another spammy WP plugin or write any HTML. All you need is the standard Text widget. Here’s how to add your own “selected posts” section. Steps: Go to …
How to Display Selected WordPress Posts in a Sidebar (no plugins or HTML) Read More »
The Law of Conservation of Testing Effort: Like energy, the total testing burden for a piece of software is constant. It can’t be added to nor reduced, only transformed. However, the cost to your business (in terms of time, money and trust) of these different forms is variable. Here’s an example. Let’s say I’ve been …
Node.js’s built-in crypto library lets you verify the signature of a file with very few lines of (Typescript) code: What if the file is large and/or you’re running on a low-memory device? This might be the case if you’re writing a firmware updater to run on an embedded device e.g. a Raspberry Pi Zero. In …
It’s coming into summer here in New Zealand. Around this time every year, the strawberry farm near our house opens for the season, selling trays of fresh strawberries and real fruit ice cream. On a hot Sunday afternoon a few weekends ago, my partner and I were driving home from some errands. Her brother had …
What Tech Startups Can Learn From a Strawberry Farm Read More »
Here’s an unavoidable fact: the software project you’re working on has some flaws that no one knows about. Not you, your users, nor anyone in your team. These could be anything from faulty assumptions in the UI to leaky abstractions in the architecture or an error-prone release process. Given enough time, these flaws will be …
Multicast DNS service discovery, aka. Zeroconf or Bonjour, is a useful means of making your node app (e.g. multiplayer game or IoT project) easily discoverable to clients on the same local network. The node_mdns module worked out-of-the-box on my Mac. Unfortunately things weren’t as straightforward on a node-alpine docker container running on Raspberry Pi Zero, …
Publishing your node service with DNS-SD/mDNS from an Alpine Linux docker container Read More »
Note: this article assumes you’re somewhat familiar with the idea of Test-Driven Development. Automated tests improve (minimally) the quality of your code by revealing some of its defects. If one of your tests fails, in theory this points to a defect in your code. You make a fix, the test passes, and the quality of …
How to Improve Your Tests by Being an Evil Coder Read More »
Why “balancing customer needs with business needs” is short-term thinking.
Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a goldmine of practical ideas for software developers, despite it not being a software development book. Redundancy is one example of such an idea that is explored. Taleb explains how having some redundancy reduces fragility, and means we don’t need to predict the future so well. Think of food …
Beyond DRY – Why Redundancy Makes Your Code More Robust and Less Fragile Read More »