It's close to 32 degrees outside. Wind whipping at your coat. No you're not on a boat. But where are you? Admittedly that's a question with one too many answers, but I bet you wouldn't guess Las Vegas. DEVintersection 2018 was again, held in Las Vegas, Nevada at the MGM…
Azure deployment slots are a fantastic feature of Azure App Services. They allow developers to have multiple versions of their application running at the same time with the added bonus of being able to re-route traffic between each instance at the press of a button. They can, however, generate a…
A story all too real...We've all seen the joke, time and time again --"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: off by one errors, cache invalidation, and naming things."It's true. Naming things can be really hard. There seems to be all of these hidden rules…
As developers, we perform a lot of code reviews (or at least we should be). They are a great way to not only ensure that the code we intend to deploy to production won't have a negative impact on the system, but also a time to learn and better ourselves.…
Not too long ago there were talks around the office regarding a new testing initiative. Now, by itself, this is fantastic news. Who wouldn't want to actually spend some time and get our testing story up to par?The problem lies within the approach that was proposed, going so far…
Speaking at GOTO Chicago's Open Source panelWow, what a week! I'll spare you from any May the fourth be with you puns (unless that in itself counts) and dive right into the best of GOTO Chicago 2018.This past week I had the opportunity to attend my first GOTO conference,…
Being involved in open source exposes you to a lot of different projects, individuals, coding styles... the works. It also means lots of code reviews. More reviews than I'd typically perform at work. In code reviews, I can be pretty opinionated. But I believe they stem from a strong desire…
Refactoring is a common task for developers.. hopefully anyway. It keeps code cleaner, more maintainable, and reduces code duplication. It also allows for code to be extended more easily, saving us time in the long run.xkcd - The General Problem (https://xkcd.com/974/)There are many approaches we…
As more and more developers embrace the joys of unit testing, I'm starting to see a lot more tests in code reviews, which is great to see! I am, however, seeing a lot of the same mistakes pop up.To help with this, I wanted to use this blog post…
As I do more and more work with the exercism.io community, I've noticed a reoccurring theme. There seems to be a lot of confusion around the various types of "test doubles" and what each of them actually do.Now, if you've had some exposure to test driven development already,…