One of the real joys of coding is writing silly little things that remove a tiny task. This one copies the name of the branch to your clipboard from the command line. I popped it in my .zshrc as I use zsh #.zshrc alias copybranch="git branch | grep '^\*' | cut -d' ' -f2 | pbcopy" No idea if I figured out that one-liner or just found it on StackOverflow but it brings me a little bit of joy every time I use it.

When I start on a feature my primary goal is to get it all working. I don’t care about how the frontend looks, I don’t care about how performant it is. I don’t care how bad my method names are. I just need it to work. People are always saying…

Having people of mixed experience can be a great learning experience for both more and less experienced developers. The less experienced developer might get some guidance on different ways of approaching a problem and gained confidence from seeing someone much more experience also struggle. The more experienced developer might gain insight from the question’s asked and get a glimpse outside of their own expert context.

When training people to do a thing please get them to do the thing as early as possible in the session. Trainees only need enough context so that they can get started. This is much less context than you think they’ll need. …

When trying to reproduce flakiness I used to just manually run the test x times from the command line and count how many times it had failed and what the errors were. Doing it in the code saved me a bunch of time. # original it "is tells us it happened" do user = create(:user) visit "/" click_link "make it happen" expect(page).to have_content "it happened" end # run it loads context "when testing for flakiness" do 20.times do it "is tells us it happened" do user = create(:user) visit "/" click_link "make it happen" expect(page).to have_content "it happened" end end end

I had just finished Makers Academy coding bootcamp and had been struggling to get a job. I was talking to another student about how the order people were hired from my class didn’t seem to reflect the skills they’d shown in the course. Their response has stuck with me, even…

This came from the actor Bradley Whitford when talking to Marc Maron (quoted from this Financial Times article). “If I’m honest, anytime any director has ever said anything to me, I go through three silent beats: Fuck you. I suck. OK, what?” He added: “I really believe that that is…

TL:DR don’t dive into “that should be easy” tasks without allowing for the fact they may not be easy “Its just a string change” Someone wanted to change the options in a dropdown select on our website. The options were helpfully collected in a localisation file similar to this one https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/main/activemodel/lib/active_model/locale/en.yml and so expected to…

TL:DR — have a test fail which stops deploys if feature flags aren’t removed within an expected timeframe. I previously wrote about how we use feature flags a lot. We still do. A problem we encountered was while we were very fast to add feature flags, we were much slower…