Changelog

This is a must-read for any software engineer wondering how they can move up the ladder without falling pray to the Peter Principle. Career progress for programmers doesn't require giving up coding to become a manager. You can get more autonomy—and stronger negotiation leverage—by going from implementer, to problem solver, to problem finder.

Kate Matsudaira provides 5 excellent strategies for pushing through: Even if you love your job, you don't always feel like doing it every day. There are so many factors that influence your ability to show up to work with enthusiasm and then work hard all day long. From gamification to calendaring, Kate has a lot of good advice in this piece. I even learned a new word, "precrastination", which I've been doing a lot of without even knowing it! 💪

Yup, it's true..."estimating project costs is hard." I thoroughly enjoyed the tongue in cheek logic shared by Dave Rupert in this post. ...let’s say your app has a logged-in or logged-out state, well, that’s at least 2 if-statements. Starting price: $20,000. Never before has it been this easy to price and scope out complex stateful apps! The cost of complexity in software is real and this is a very practical post to share with would be customers of your software team. This applies to freelancers, consultants, and even teams inside larger orgs. We all have to account for our time, and that means accounting for the money being spent along the way.

Silas Reinagel: Recently, I led a 7-day highly-ambitious software project in which both the quantity and quality of work delivered blew away all my expectations. This is what empowered such incredible productivity. Click through for explanations of all 5 key factors.

Brad Armstrong lays it all out there about how to transition from an engineer to a manager: There are decades of books and thousands of blogs dedicated to trying to answer these questions, so I‘m not here to pretend that I’ve got the secret to success. But I do know a few ways that I’m pretty sure can guarantee you’ll fail. He takes you through 8 easy steps to failure. I'll disappoint you now and spoil that step 1 is to keep coding 😱

Yegor applies a kitchen metaphor to code: The kitchen is clean when there is no dirt in the oven. But if its electric panel speaks French, I can’t use the kitchen. Even if it’s perfectly clean. It’s not clear how to use it—that’s why it’s useless. Sounds good to me, but how do you know if your code is actually clean and clear? He provides a heuristic: If a stranger can modify your code and fix a bug in less than an hour, it is maintainable. The entire post is well worth a read.

Lorenzo Pasqualis on why agile practices and vision must coexist. And why.

When you pull in a library dependency, it is rare that you need all of the functionality it offers. This isn't usually a problem for backends, because that code never leaves the server. However, In frontend-land your users pay the price for all that unused functionality every time they hit your website with a cold cache. Moment.js is an excellent date/time library. It is packed with functionality, and you probably don't need everything it has to offer. Instead, check out date-fns, which offers small, highly targeted functions you can probably get by with. There's even an ESLint plugin that will help you identify places in your codebase where you don't really need Moment.js!

What is flow? ...a state of mental flow. Programmers live for it and work at their peak potential when they are in it. Also known as “the zone,” Flow is the mental state of operation in which a programmer is immersed in a feeling of energized focus, complete involvement, and enjoyment in the process of coding. Here's a challenge — read this and apply just one idea to your work this week and report back in Slack how your work was impacted, positive or negative.

This contrarian post comes by way of the aptly named programmingisterrible.com. It's a bit ranty, but I rather enjoy the author's tone: If you ask a programmer for advice—a terrible idea—they might tell you something like the following: Don’t repeat yourself. Programs should do one thing and one thing well. Never rewrite your code from scratch, ever! He'll take you step-by-step through why he thinks these generally accepted principles are often mistakes.

In response to a recent Twitter poll from Kent C. Dodds, Eric Clemmons shared concerns about how organizational boundaries are impacting where development happens. Kent tweeted... Hey folks who have a decoupled client-server application (no server rendering, server is just an API server). Where is your client code and server code located? (#) Together in one repo? In separate repos? Eric writes in his response on Medium: Software is like Jello: poke it in one place, and another place jiggles. In my experience, a repository should house all of the code necessary to make developing & shipping features relatively frictionless. This isn't an exact 1:1, but this was a big part of the reason why Segment transitioned back to a monorepo.

Yego Bugayenko: Here is a simple principle for naming methods in OOP, which I'm trying to follow in my code: it's a verb if it manipulates, it's a noun if it builds. That's it. Nothing in between. Methods like saveFile() or getTitle() don't fit and must be renamed and refactored. Moreover, methods that "manipulate" must always return void, for example print() or save(). Let me explain. Naming objects well has been a career-long struggle for me. I just might give this a try...

Adam and Jerod talk with two members of Segment’s engineering team: Co-founder and CTO, Calvin French-Owen, as well as Software Engineer, Alex Noonan, about their journey from monorepo to microservices back to monorepo. 100s of problem children to 1 superstar child.

Martin Fowler reflects on the journey of agile software development... Our challenge at the moment isn't making agile a thing that people want to do, it's dealing with what I call faux-agile: agile that's just the name, but none of the practices and values in place. Ron Jeffries often refers to it as "Dark Agile", or specifically "Dark Scrum". This is actually even worse than just pretending to do agile, it's actively using the name "agile" against the basic principles of what we were trying to do, when we talked about doing this kind of work in the late 90s at Snowbird. The three main challenges we should focus on are: fighting the Agile Industrial Complex and its habit of imposing process upon teams, raising the importance of technical excellence, and organizing our teams around products (rather than projects).

Nick Parsons writes on Hacker Noon: This article will be your one-stop shop for Docker, going over some of the best practices and must-know commands that any user should know.

Custom hostnames on Glitch backed by a global network of fast edge-servers. We're proud to announce that you can now weave your Glitch projects into a Fly Edge App, deploy to our global fleet of servers and serve your Glitch project from a custom domain name across our fast, global network. 💥

Prominent startup/developer forum Hacker News has shown us how shaken these two groups were. Most GDPR articles received hundreds of upvotes and comments. The reactions had a feeling of mass hysteria. This motivated me to embark on a mission to bring knowledge and peace of mind to the software developer and startup world. ... I initiated a number of AMAs -- Ask Me Anything discussions -- on a variety of forums. Here are the top questions I received... Hongli went on to answer questions like "Where do I begin with making sense of GDPR and what to tackle first?", "What are the most valuable online resources for getting actionable advice?", "Given that you have no business presence or interest in the EU, what is the worst thing that can happen if you're not compliant?" ...

Error handling in an asynchronous language works in a unique way and presents many challenges, some unexpected. There are seven main error handling patterns in Node.js. Let's briefly check them all. I'm not sure if this post serves to demystify all of these techniques, but it's definitely a nice, quick overview of the different patterns.

If we get rid of the concept of "model objects", then there should be very little (almost zero) space for procedural code/algorithms in our codebase, since each object is a component that has its well-defined place in the bigger picture. The following question arises: where does the "business logic" go? The answer is: business logic should be visible in how objects are wrapping/composing each other, rather than being visible in a 200 LoC method of some "service" class.

Do you have documentation? Do you have a documentation content strategy? No?!! If you want to create guides for your software, having a solid content strategy can help you write useful content. This article will walk you through how to develop that strategy, whether you’re an engineer or a technical writer, new to writing documentation or just looking to get more strategic about it.

The cause is a 2FA fail with either SIM security or a mobile number port-out scam as the point of failure. Brian Krebs writes for KrebsOnSecurity: Of particular note is that although the Reddit employee accounts tied to the breach were protected by SMS-based two-factor authentication, the intruder(s) managed to intercept that second factor. In one common scenario, known as a SIM-swap, the attacker masquerading as the target tricks the target’s mobile provider into tying the customer’s service to a new SIM card that the bad guys control. Another typical scheme involves mobile number port-out scams, wherein the attacker impersonates a customer and requests that the customer’s mobile number be transferred to another mobile network provider. Were you exposed? ...between June 14 and 18 an attacker compromised several employee accounts at its cloud and source code hosting providers. Reddit said the exposed data included internal source code as well as email addresses and obfuscated passwords for all Reddit users who registered accounts on the site prior to May 2007. The incident also exposed the email addresses of some users who had signed up to receive daily email digests of specific discussion threads.

The important thing to remember about leading is you have to have clear lines of communication with those you lead. I love the ideas Lara shared in this guide to writing a "week in review" team update. This doc helped me set records straight, disseminate info to lots of people at once, and open up conversation internally, while reflecting on the themes that had come up in weekly one-on-ones, backchannels, team meetings, etc. What I chose to write about each time widely varied. Though the teams who reported to me were the primary audience for this doc, I kept it internally-public, meaning that anyone at the company could read and comment in it. I found that some other managers just weren’t talking about hard things that were happening...

Ali Spittel lays out 7 excellent tips for writing cleaner code. Use descriptive naming Functions should do one thing well Comments should tell the "why" ... It's imperative to first learn rules like these, follow them for awhile, and then (and only then) you will be equipped to know when (and when not) to break the rules.

Tigran Hakobyan, remote software engineer at Buffer, writes on the freeCodeCamp blog: Working remotely is very different from working in the office. I don’t think you fully grasp the difference until you actually start being remote. For someone like me who never worked in a remote environment, the beginning wasn’t smooth and it came with challenges. I can clearly remember my very first day at Buffer... Tigran also shares a pretty comprehensive breakdown of a typical workday.

In the wake of Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, the murmurs of replacing GitHub with something decentralized have been getting louder. In this article, Drew Devault points out that email-based git workflows are A Thing and one that works quite well. In particular, this blog post is a direct response to forge-net (formerly known as GitPub). They want to federate and decentralize git using ActivityPub, the same technology leveraged by Mastodon and PeerTube. But get this: git is already federated and decentralized! Drew has skin in the game via his sr.ht platform, and intends to make git send-email support a first-class citizen on it. Lots of interesting ideas at play here. After all these years is email still the web's killer app?