Productivity Archives - Coding Nagger

January 31, 2019January 31, 2019

Slow CI: real problem or easy excuse for developers?

When you write software, you can end up in a place where your continuous integration takes too long to execute. For most of the post I will write CI because it’s faster to type. Also it makes your read slightly faster.

When delivering software continuously, the more complex solution, the more you are prone to having a slow CI process at some point. Note that a limited computing power also increases the chances of slow CI becoming your burden.

July 19, 2017

Time: Fail fast and bounce back

Time saving tube fail

Nowadays, most tools we use exists to save time. In London to travel through public transports we have tons of options to make our lives easier. Contactless debit card, ticket, Oyster card, you name it. However, having the choice between these options may reveal troublesome when in a rush. Indeed, on Monday I used my debit card by accident instead of my Oyster card making myself pay for a right I already have. Also, if I did not use it again while leaving the tube I would have ended up getting charged the max amount. I think it is £6.60 instead of £2.40 for a journey in zone 1. Luckily, I realised my mistake on the spot allowing me to rectify it while leaving at my station.

I did that mistake because I saw the elevator open and jumped in. Yes I got in the elevator, but instead of losing a couple minutes I lost money. Indeed the amount is as insignificant as the time saved, however that got me thinking. I started thinking about these times where I made design or coding decisions to save time. The classic “let’s do something quick” that is basically the coder’s “spray and pray”.

Spray and pray then spray to slay

In Monday’s instance, the “spray and pray” was to tap my wallet on whichever side is more accessible. I knew odds to mistakenly use my debit card was 50/50 and I knew how to limit the loss in case of failure. When the failure happened, I paid a price I was ready for when the time came. Similarly to a project however, you need to reduce the risks of your decisions as much as possible or at least figure a way to turn things around if they go south. Failing to recognise the risks of the choices we make will be as punishing as the risks taken allow.

This might be the key here. Maybe, it’s not about missing a shot, but about the rebound. About what you will do when the ball bounces back. If you know how to bounce back from a mistake you will feel empowered to do more and learn from them. Maybe in the end being a good developer is not necessarily about making the right choice every time. It can be about evaluating the potential consequences of our choices and ensure that they are worth taking. Also it can be about whether we can adapt off the result of our choices.

So next time I take the tube, I will slow down to tap my Oyster instead of my debit card. Coding wise, I could run into the most MacGuffinest MacGuffin piece of software that might help on a project and still take time to evaluate its pros and cons so that I can mitigate the risks of using it.

June 30, 2017September 18, 2018

My Musketeers for DotNet Test driven development

Test, four letters, one meaning and for some people a struggle. Getting people around you to write tests is easy only when everyone already agrees with you. As often, there are instances where some people show resistance to writing tests. Here is the stuff I hear the most from them:

D: I don’t have time to write tests.
A: I don’t need to test this.
B: I can’t write a test for this.

March 28, 2017September 18, 2018

Simple continuous integration with Appveyor and Newman

Last month, I posted about Postman enabling you to test your APIs with little effort so that you can build future-proof software. Here we are going to cover setting up continuous integration for a simple project by using Newman to run your Postman collections. You may have heard about continuous integration in the past. Most commonly, continuous integration will build software from one’s changes before or after merging them into the main codebase. Even though there is an infinity of tools that allow implementing continuous integration, I will focus on Appveyor CI. In order to make things simple, I will create a very basic web API project and will host it on GitHub.

November 6, 2016November 6, 2016

Going full necromancian on old projects

Old projects, they often end in what I call development hell. This odd place where some projects with a good potential become stale after a release or die because too late for a market. Very often personal projects end up there even when they are open source. Open source really seem like a tool to help spreading and sharing knowledge worldwide depending on the kind of project. Before open source democratized with the likes of Github a huge number of personal projects probably took years to be released when not abandoned.

Today I decided to do the only kind of necromancy one should do: Bringing back an old project to life. A project for which I already wrote the code for the model and business logic. I had to make create a user interface and build a user experience as sleek as possible. However, I stopped it due to my vision of a market I thought crowded along with the lack of time. Now I see clearly that was not as true as I thought.

Here we are. Two months I did not post here, eleven months without working on a personal development project I am back at it. I spent my past weekends alternating between gym, party and sleep. Luckily, I work in a position where my brain I can keep my brain stimulated. Indeed, when not investigating an issue on one of our live apps nor working on our platform features I am defining development tools and processes to be used at company scale within the next months. Eventually, a lot of cool things will come out of that. I will definitely post a few related tutorials depending on schedule.

About the blog, I will try to post more regularly than I have maybe a tutorial. In terms of work I would like to share with you the video that we recorded last week. It is basically the new company careers video that I like not just because I am in it. You can definitely check it out below:

If you arrived that far in the post, first I would like to thank you for reading and watching the video. Second, do not abandon your old projects if you are not a 100% sure they are dead. Check your old source code even if it is to mock your old coding style. In the end you could actually have something worth the hassle.