article
∞
Fundamentals
I am an expert in writing and working with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. But today I was in a fortunate position to realise something: By now, I am language-agnostic. With one of my current clients, I am working with Node.js and Angular. There’s even some PHP in there. My client knew that I haven’t worked with any of these technologies before. Yet they wanted to have me anyway. Even for a price that was above their initial budget.
∞
Taking note
Today I want to share a small little idea with you. An idea that can have grave consequences if misregarded:
When you schedule a meeting with your team, also share with the team who is responsible for taking minutes/notes. One person has to be responsible for that.
∞
Evolve
Since I strongly believe that you can only achieve high-quality work if you trust your teammates, I am trying something today. I trust you.
I will show you a skeleton in my closet.
∞
Frustration
Over the weekend I had (kind of) a conversation with a good friend. The topic revolved around doing the work on software projects, and how that is sometimes harder to do in a right way. Because of external factors, or because of company policy. In essence, this creates frustration. Probably nothing new there for you.
∞
How to train for a marathon
If you want to run a marathon, you have to train for it. Very few people can do that without deliberate training. You have to run for many kilometers consistently and do speed and interval training in between. If you let your training slip, it means your performance on race day will be worse.
∞
Measure it
I believe in improving the quality of your software projects. If you want to improve something, you have to measure it first. That idea was introduced by Peter Drucker, the famous management book author.
Now if I ask you, what metrics you could measure about your code quality, would you have an answer?
∞
Code quality & security audit
I spent the day at a new client’s office. They hired my to do a complete code quality and security audit for their website and shop system. They are rebuilding and relaunching it. The app is built using Ruby on Rails.
∞
One metric
From the feedback I got for my questions and letters regarding the quality of software projects, I can tell you one metric software developers look for.
∞
Let the computer help you with that comment
Commenting code and documenting it has been a topic in these letters already. I linked to resources on how to write docs etc.
For the future, this might not be necessary anymore. Because you can have a machine write the comments for you. There is a research project done by Chinese researchers Xing Hu, Ge Li, Xin Xia, David Lo and Zhi Jin named “Deep Code Comment Generation”.
∞
Time well spent
Yesterday I went to an exciting event. The topic was “Can Artificial Intelligence synthesize software?”. The company Seerene organized the event. I haven’t heard about them before, but they are just what I like. They analyze code and projects for optimization potential and defects. I started the conversation with them, let’s see what comes out of it.