Viewing profile — jbrains

We are closing next week on a 5-pin bowling center in central Canada. I have vague plans to do something similar, but no skill on the hardware/software interface side of things. I …

First, that sounds hard. I'm happy that you're asking for help and I hope you find the help you need. Next, you'll probably get a bunch of advice about leaving immediately, how you…

Read the book "The E-Myth Revisited" before you decide to go solo. You might be having an entrepreneurial seizure; it's not necessarily a bad thing, but you might prefer to be bett…

> I feel guilty when our customers have repeated bugginess in our app. You might be feeling over-responsible for the bugginess in your app. If you did your job perfectly, which for…

I routinely run a combination of Slack and Discourse for my online communities. I can move interesting Slack threads into Discourse for longer-term and more-thoughtful discussion. …

This happens all the time. We have a vague notion of a thing, so we call it "X". Later, as we learn more, we realize that we can think of X as a category of things, and that one of…

I agree. I think you've overstated how many people take that position, but I agree. By the same token, I find it unfortunate when a person turns "TDD doesn't work for me" into "TDD…

I think of it the other way: if it's easy to write code that "understands" your code, then it's probably easy to understand your code, because you can encode (ha!) your understandi…

"V" means "viable". The profit motive encourages businesses to race to the bottom of "viability" just as with quality. So it will always be.

I like to pair. I like to talk about pairing. I have worked with people who don't pair well. I worked with one person whose wife noticed that his entire personality changed for the…

TDD is a fundamental learning technique. It teaches the principles of modular design. Notice! One can learn modular design in a variety of ways. I make no claim that TDD is "the on…

"Better to leave it in the social sphere." I don't consider this some idle philosophical stance, either. The technical solutions don't actually solve the problem, since people work…

I see a lot of comments here of the type "You have to know when to refactor". I don't do it this way. Instead, I rely on a willingness to undo a refactoring when I see that somethi…

I just realised that the statement "it's still an if-then construct" illustrates a common problem among people practising OOP: conflating implementation with interface. The OR is n…

Yes, but that's probably a matter of familiarity over clarity. This is a perfect time to use the irrationally-dreaded ternary operator. param = object.property.nil? ? default_value…

Not an if statement, but unnecessarily clever code that doesn't reveal its intent. An example of the tension between general clarity and a concise, well-known idiom. The kind of th…

The only person who may feel pain is the person with the greatest problems in the world? Really? By whose measure? Where will we track this? How will we update the leaderboard? I k…

The dearth of empathy built into this "comment" is disquieting. You make many assumptions here. Can you count them? What if you've got only half of them wrong? No matter how good w…

I generate about $25k/year in mostly-passive-income from single family rental homes. I average 20 hours/year maintaining this income stream in answering email, collecting invoices …

Maybe this: in "draft mode", you automatically commit on all changes in pass/fail state. Then, at some point, you "publish", at which point you squash all the commits from commit X…

I have started doing this for my training courses. When I demonstrate live, I commit to git. I use some variation of "FAILING" in the commit messages to call attention to "red" com…

Did this manager spot the causation between compulsory bowling and folks resigning?

I would have enjoyed the article more without the needless judgment of "not worth learning".

I think you're overanalysing a phrase written by people whose first language is not English. :) I interpret it as "Don't kill yourself to make money if you can live /like/ you alre…

The most fun part of this lifestyle is being able to say "I'd like to go to Paris again this year", then finding work close enough to Paris to pay for going to Paris. By not needin…