Programmer’s Paradox

The title of this post is taken verbatim from a post of the same name by Jay Fields.
Jay’s point is that it isn’t enough to go through the motions of being a developer. Part of being a developer is understanding the point of the motions you’re going through.  If you don’t understand why, you [...]

I’ve often read about paired programming, having heard its benefits extolled from Bob Martin when he gave my coworkers and I training, to reading about it at Hashrocket, where they “pair all the fucking time“.
It’s easy to find naysayers and it’s easy to rationalize why it might not work, the biggest reason being that it [...]

Last year Bob Martin gave my coworkers and me some training on how to implement Test Driven Development.  Bob advocated for very small methods - even suggesting that methods often only have one or two lines of code.  If they started approaching five to ten, they could probably be broken down into separate methods.
Yesterday, while [...]

I’ve mentioned before that I think programming languages should have a REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop).
Unfortunately, PHP does not have one natively.  However, I just discovered that Facebook has opened sourced a REPL for PHP - so now you can test out your PHP code without needing to write and run a script.
Working in Python, I’ve found Python’s [...]

This is just a reminder that you should write failing unit tests first, so that when you forget

if __name__ == ‘__main__’
unittest.main()

in your test file, like I did, you don’t think everything is working because none of the tests fail.