The programming industry is very much about what’s new—the hottest language, technique, or framework. But, the best programmers—the ones that are going to stick around for the long haul—rely on a few timeless principles. These are the ones that take years of practicing the craft to truly master. Even further, they are relevant regardless of
Four essential traits of the long-term programmer Read More »
We usually talk about refactoring code with the same kind of pedantic approach we do with all other kinds of software writing. We come up with recipes to abstract, break apart, and clarify. We fold these techniques together into larger ideas and catchier names like the Mikado method, the Big Bang approach, divide and conquer,
There’s a benefit to writing strict code. In this post, Ka Wai Cheung, explains why.
About a year ago at this time, I was really busy. I was in the home stretch of wedding planning, preparing for a cross-country move from Chicago to San Francisco, and managing the usual full-plate I have at work—writing code for DoneDone, supporting our HR product, KinHR, as well as a few of the consulting
In the past, I’ve often wrestled with designing an optimal relational database model to represent users in a multi-tenant system. I’ve wanted to get the model just right—enough structure to accomodate future enhancements without bloating the schema with excessive JOINs, overly-wide tables, or any other number of typical relational-database “sins”. Over four years into our
Building the optimal user database model for your application Read More »
Having worked with automated testing in various forms for a few years now, I’ve come to a few conclusions about where it fits in the mindset of a software developer—and about how it can become a crutch in programmer behavior if we fit it improperly. Testing vs. checking For a while now, something’s felt strange
Where automated testing should (and shouldn’t) fit in your testing strategy Read More »
Yesterday, we released a small update to DoneDone’s workflow. Based on many requests over the past few years, we’ve added an “On Hold” status option for issues. The last time we introduced a new issue status to DoneDone? April 15, 2009 — the day we launched. Yep, we’re pretty particular about the kinds of statuses
Designers and programmers working together produce better outcomes.
Why programmers should be a part of the design process Read More »
We’ve been running DoneDone for the past six years, growing from a small app with a few customers here and there to a critical business tool that’s helped tens of thousands of users resolve issues in over 140 countries.We’ve picked up and moved our entire hosting environment twice, while fundamentally changing our technological infrastructure each
Our super-slow growth strategy on automating customer support Read More »
What do you do when you’re faced with a head-scratching bug? You know, the ones that have you questioning whether 2 + 2 is always 4 (because apparently sometimes it is not)? The ones where you’ve spent the entirety of a once-promising day of productivity drowning in a molasses of impossibilities? Regardless of the problem,
