Posts Tagged: programming

daylerees/colour-schemes

Ask almost any developer: we’re picky about our color schemes in our text editors. I see a lot of suggestions online, but many are poorly thought out or don’t have decent coverage among multiple programming languages. But Lavavel developer Dayle Rees really outdid himself with this package. It’s available across several of the most popular editors (Sublime Text, Coda, VIM, XCode) and he provides 50 plus variations, in both subtle and more high contrast forms. Best of all, I couldn’t find one that isn’t well designed.

Generally I’m a die hard fan of Solarized Dark out of the default Sublime Text 3 setup. But Dayle’s color schemes are tempting; I’m running a few test development days with some of the darker variations that match my style.

Five tools for analyzing dysfunction in engineering culture

Author “Shanley” on Medium:

What about when we reward acts of heroism — recovering from severe outages, working unreasonable hours, emerging triumphant from a death march? When such acts of heroism are very visible and rewarded, do we end up with a situation where people are incentivized to manifest the very conditions of catastrophe that allow them to be heroes? At what point are we actually incentivized to create unrealistic deadlines, work at an unsustainable cadence, even cause production issues?

Letter to a young programmer considering a startup

Developer and writer Alex Payne:

A startup is just a means to an end. Consider the end, and don’t seek to revel in the means. What do you care about? Who do you want to help? Does a startup make meeting your goals easier or harder? Where will it leave you when your goal is met? Where will it leave you if it isn’t?

Startups are portrayed as an exciting…but a few interviews at later-stage startups will make clear just how quickly they ossify into structures that look very much like the organizations that came before them.

So true. I’ve both experienced touches of this here and there earlier in my career, and know so many other horror stories of fellow web developers that have sacrificed their personal lives at the alter of a “hot startup” that falls apart within a few months. I appreciate Alex isn’t anti-startups in his argument; he emphasizes balance, something sorely lacking from content we read every day on Hacker News and Techcrunch.

Dropbox is a Git remote

I’ve seen hints at this over at other posts, but developer Rob Stinogle gives the best explanation I’ve seen of how to use Dropbox as an effective Git remote repository. It’s no GitHub, but for a private project where you’re the sole contributor, it’s pretty slick, not to mention free (assuming you have the Dropbox space) and secure.

Yes, designers and engineers can play nice

As I’ve noted previously here, a great design and development working relationship is essential. Developer Derrick Ko writes a great post on how to make that possible:

Plan your sprints with both engineering and design present. Give both sides a chance to be heard when deciding the priority of upcoming feature work. There’s a lot less friction when the team understands the tradeoffs at play.

Once things are prioritized, stick to it.

Twelve curated tips and workflows from the trenches

Git is an endlessly powerful version control system, by far the strongest I’ve ever used in my career. Yet that said, I stick pretty much to basic command line (pull, push, diff) commands on a daily basis. Developer Nicola Paolucci’s post on Git tips I think will change this. Major hat tip to him for two actions I’d invoke commonly: listing all deleted files in a respository and searching for a string in all revisions of git history.

Commanding your text editor

If you’re a developer or designer and use a text editor regularly, knowing keyboard shortcuts is a huge productivity booster. This quick primer over at the PeepCode blog is a nice starting point.

Be nice to programmers

Developer Myles Recny:

My workflow is something like this.

write some code

run the code

get an error message

find the error and back to step 1

Hour by hour, day after day, I do this. Always searching for what’s wrong with what I’m creating, rarely thinking about what’s good about it. It’s a negative reinforcement feedback loop.

Insightful.

Blockr

Blockr is a new Chrome extension that blocks you from the internet until you’ve reached some writing or coding goal. A bit draconian perhaps, but for easily distracted workers, this may be worth investing time into.

How can I encourage a culture of punctuality in a software company?

Nice open debate thread over on Stack Exchange regarding developer attitude and work ethic in the office. A lot of interesting and helpful replies here.