What’s a technical coach? Two years ago, I attended an open space session at an online conference called MenderCon. The session was hosted by a technical coach who was offering to help people improve their tests. I had heard of a technical coach before, but this time it really stood out to me. The experience I had with him changed my career trajectory completely. A technical coach guides teams toward technical excellence which helps them reach their full potential.

You can stop improving your debugging skills When I first started coding in college, I remember how hard programming was in those days. One project, we were tasked to build KABOOM! Back then, I was not good at design. We’re talking “death from a thousand if’s” here. My professor encouraged everyone to write many comments. Now I understand why… our code was impossible to read! Back then, no ones code read like a book.

1. Leave the code better than you found it To be more caring developers we must treat the code we write with respect and reverence. We must respect the future readers of your code. We often find ourselves placed with the task of maintaining legacy codebases. Some are prettier than others, but at the end of the day they are valuable to their users and serve a great purpose for the company.

How it all started Today I’m going to talk about how I got into software development. I will be covering my previous career, my move to Chicago, and the interview process that led to my first job in the software industry. Life as a Patent Classifier After graduating from college with a degree in Electrical Engineering, I began working for a company contracted with the US Patent Office. My job was to read patents and place tags on them which would help categorize/classify them.

TDD in React Test driven development (TDD) is a tool for breaking down complex problems into more manageable chunks. This post will explore my journey of applying a TDD approach to website development using React, Jest, and the React Testing Library. In this experiment, I didn’t look at the browser for feedback at all. Instead I got all of my feedback from the automated tests. By focusing on the behavior of the components I’m building, I am able to get a working UI quickly and I’m able to change it’s behavior while still verifying its accuracy.

XP and Scrum Differences This is a continuation on where we left off in the previous post: Agile Methodologies: Comparing XP and Scrum. Last time we discussed the origins of Agile and began to explore some of the differences between XP and Scrum (i.e. sprint cycles and engineering practices). Let’s get back into it! Code Reviews A code review is a process of letting a person other than the original code developer inspect the new code changes.

Transitioning from XP to Scrum Today I will discuss two Agile frameworks: Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. After working in an XP environment for several years, I’ve recently started on my first Scrum team. A lot of the content in this post is based on my own experiences with these two frameworks. Please note that these methodologies can vary slightly from place to place. Wait, what’s Agile again? The idea of Agile started with the Agile Manifesto.