This afternoon my intern asked me this simple question. She’s a new developer, and a friend of hers is working in a fresh codebase, with best practices. Everything is nice, and he can keep the entirety of it in his head. She’s working with my team, Support Engineering. We’re the front-line bug squashers at our company. We’ve got a legacy codebase with no tests and brain melting insanity around every bend.
First, it should be noted that not all stories are “User Stories”. For example a developer might be tasked with manually running some script. The Story might simply be “run the fooberry script”.
For everything that effects the UI, use a template:
As a < type of user >
I want < to perform some task >
So that < I can achieve some goal >
Note that it’s all about what the user wants.
Finding the Github pull request associated with a branch.
Work on a large enough project, with other people and sooner or later you’re going to find some commit, or branch, and want to know what was in the pull request that merged it in. Maybe you want to see what other commits got merged over at the same time. Maybe you want to see what the diff was at that point in time.
Writing code is a lot like maintaining a Bonsai Tree. If you stop pruning it it’ll stop being a Bonsai and turn into a bush. Little tweaks, frequently aesthetic ones, will help to keep it beautiful and under control. It will still grow in unexpected directions, as other developers make changes, but careful pruning will keep it balanced, and healthy.
What is “careful pruning” then?
Each file is a branch on our tree.
The Daily Standup Meeting is a core aspect of Agile development. The simplified idea is that you want to start the day with a very quick status check of what everyone’s working on, and helps “…to coordinate efforts to resolve difficult and/or time-consuming issues”.
But, how do you keep track of the things your minions are working on today and deal with your own tasks, and 400 daily interruptions? For me the answer was to put together the Daily Team Tracker Worksheet.
The backstory Once upon a time there was a Kickstarter to make the world’s most awesome keyboard / case … thing to “Turn your iPad® into a laptop”. As with most hardware projects on Kickstarter the expected delivery date came and went, and came and went again, but I feel the folks at Crux did a great job of keeping the backers informed, and the reasons it got set back almost always boiled down to them not being willing to accept half-assed Chinese manufacturing even if it would have gotten it into our hands sooner.
The thing about today is that we have the power.
We, can destroy this fear.
Not by being stoic. Not by being “strong”. By smiling. By being human. By being the neighbors we wish we were surrounded by.
Go outside.
Smile at a stranger.
Ask someone how they’re doing and mean it.
Listen.
Yesterday’s act was horrific, but I will light up this mother fucking town with smiles, because we are alive, and this world is filled with brilliant people with warm hearts, and their own 200 watt smiles, just waiting to shine.
tldr; git’s default configuration with regards to push is potentially very dangerous. make sure you’ve run git config --global push.default current There are other options for push.default but make sure you read the docs before setting them. setting current as your default behavior means no more complaints about setting upstream when pushing. Perception vs. Reality vis-à-vis git push When it comes to git push most people think “It pushes my current branch’s updates up to the remote server” but that’s only a small part of what’s happening, and ignorance about the rest can leave you with very upset coworkers.
This morning’s shower brought me an interesting series of thoughts that I thought you might appreciate, and it all started with the simple question of “How do you set The Atomic Clock?”
My first thought was that at some point you have to find some other clock and precisely sync up with it. Then again, they may have said “fuck it” and just had Bob press a button when some other clock flipped over, but then I wondered “How do we know what time it is in the first place?
There are two things that make using vim awesome… no there are about 200,000 but most of them involve adding a few lines to your .vimrc to enable them, or installing a plugin. My .vimrc is just over 300 lines after all these years of use and customization. But, rather than go into all that, I figured some of the vim geeks out there might appreciate a pointer to some of the plugins I use.
