Developer On Call

Posted on December 3, 2018 | 13 comments

For the system at work, I am on call one week every seven weeks. For most of the past ten years, I have been on organized on call rotations for the systems I have been developing. I think being on call is a logical way of taking responsibility for your work. You also learn a lot from it. However, it is stressful and an inconvenience, so you should get paid for it. Continue reading →

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My Favorite Command-Line Shortcuts

Posted on August 11, 2018 | 19 comments

I use a shell every day. Almost always, I want to repeat a previous command, or repeat it after a slight modification. A very convenient way is to use arrow-up to get the most recent command back. Another common trick is to type ctrl-r and incrementally search for a previously used command. However, there are two other tricks for repeating previous commands that I use all the time, which are not as well known. Continue reading →

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6 Git Aha Moments

Posted on June 25, 2018 | 24 comments

When I switched jobs four years ago, I went from using subversion (svn) to using git as the version control system. Even though I am a pretty quick learner, it took me a quite a while to really understand git. I read a lot on how git works, but even so, I didn’t always realize what the implications were for how to use git. Here are six big “aha moments” I had on how to use git. Continue reading →

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Posted in Learning, Programming

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Is Manual Testing Needed?

Posted on May 1, 2018 | 13 comments

For the past few years, I have heard many people advocating using only automatic tests. For example, if all the automatic tests pass, then the code should automatically be deployed to production. I have always performed a bit of manual testing before feeling confident about my code. So for the past year I have paid extra attention to bugs I have found manually testing my own code. My conclusion: manual testing is still needed. Continue reading →

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Exercises in Programming Style

Posted on March 13, 2018 | 6 comments

In the book club at work, we recently finished reading Exercises in Programming Style by Cristina Videira Lopes. The book consists of a simple program implemented in 33 different programming styles. It is a great way of showing the different styles, and the book was quite popular in the book club. The book is relatively new (it was published in 2014), and I don’t think it is as well-known as it deserves to be. So here is a summary and review of it. Continue reading →

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Posted in Learning, Programming

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Programming for Grade 8

Posted on December 17, 2017 | 11 comments

For the past two months, I have been helping my son’s grade 8 class to learn to program. All students wrote Python programs and got a feel for what programming is. This post has details on how we organized the course, code examples and lessons learned. Continue reading →

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6 Years of Thoughts on Programming

Posted on November 26, 2017 | 3 comments

It is now more than 6 years since I started blogging about software development. It has been a great experience, and I thought I would reflect on what I have learnt. So here are my reasons for writing about programming, a bit on my process, and some statistics. Continue reading →

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