Doing Things Better – Page 2

Decisions in 1 Pomodori

By chad April 17, 2015Doing Things Better, Programming, UncategorizedNo Comments

All programmers suffer from analysis paralysis at some point in their career. The trick is bringing it to a swift conclusion. Try this to move forward next time. Give yourself 1 pomorodi (25 minutes) to analyze the problem. After that make a decision and go with it. Whatever falls out…

A Better AsyncTestCase for Python

By chad March 21, 2015Doing Things Better, ProgrammingNo Comments

If you need asynchronous support in python unit tests, there are a few possibilities. A simple google search points you to a few packages, one being tornado. Tornado's tornado.testing.AsyncTestCase seems straight-forward. However it does have a shortcoming: it's not thread-safe. Trying to use it with a thread will result in…

Automating Pylint with Gulp.js

By chad February 6, 2015Doing Things Better, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

Automating Pylint (and other Python Tasks) can be achieved with several viable python-based methods, but what if we used Gulp.js? The following code snippet gathers runs Pylint on the set of python files defined by pySource. var gulp = require('gulp'), shell = require('gulp-shell'); gulp.task("pylint", function() { log('Linting with pylint ->…

No Comments – A Failure Twice

By chad August 17, 2014Doing Things Better, Programming, Software Engineering, TipsNo Comments

Everyone that writes code has encountered or written their fair share of undocumented code. A failure twice? I was encouraged to write this article because of something I read about the pinball game that once was included with windows. According to the article on MSDN, the pinball game was removed…

Knowing When You've Wrote Crappy Code

By chad July 26, 2014Doing Things Better, Key Concepts, Programming, Software Engineering5 Comments

Note: This article was kicked off by one I read over at LosTechies. We write lots of code, statistically speaking some of it is what we'd deem as "crappy." If you're doing things right and progressing in your career and your understanding; your definition of "crappy code" should change over…

Isolate, Understand, Implement

By chad July 18, 2014Doing Things Better, Key Concepts, Programming, Software EngineeringNo Comments

Isolate, understand, implement: three very important things to remember when adding, modifying or replacing features on a project. The first step is to isolate the feature. Hopefully, your project is designed in such a way that once the code is isolated it is in a single place. The next step…

Presentation Is Everything

By chad August 19, 2012Doing Things Better, Featured, Key Concepts, Software EngineeringNo Comments

PRESENTATION IS EVERYTHING There is something that learned over the past couple of years, presentation is everything. It is quite possibly the most important element in all we do. Presentation from the aspect of leadership can mean the difference between shared vision and unengaged worker bee. Presentation from the aspect…

Good Videos From TEDxHuntsville 2011

By chad December 27, 2011Doing Things Better, Inspirations, TechnologyNo Comments

These are from TEDxHuntsville 2011. Thought I'd posted about these already, but I guess I forgot to. Travis Taylor - Stay With It: You Have the Power to Change Your World http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQNCUsHQYHE Tim Pickens - Explore, Have Fun and Live to Tell About It http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZOwAXr-Sp8 Daniel Crosby - You're Not…

Programming Progress

By chad December 20, 2011Doing Things Better, ProgrammingNo Comments

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” - Bill Gates I have that quote on my instant messenger. I found out Friday that someone had saw and used it. Its good that someone found it useful. It's a very valid point to…

Scheduling Time To Think

By chad December 18, 2011Doing Things BetterNo Comments

Here is another interesting post I found tonight on Lifehacker. This one approaches scheduling time for nothing but thinking. Source: Why Your Schedule Should Have a Weekly Appointment Dedicated to "Thinking Time".