Thirteen years ago, a group of friends and I started eating out every Friday night and going back to someone’s house for drinks and board games. After college we started getting married and rotating through 3 houses to serve a 3 course meal on fancy new wedding china. Then came children and suddenly we became a very LOUD potluck dinner on Saturday nights. More friends wanted their families to be included and now we have 12 adults, 10 children (plus one more on the way)! We have 5 houses we rotate through using a simple queue for who is hosting. Sometimes family events interfere with a couples ability to host or a holiday causes us to skip a week. By the time we added our fifth family to the rotation we couldn’t keep track of whose turn it was.

We all have little nits that we find in a codebase. During code reviews those nits may stand out, but are too minor to bring up. Over time they can compound into a bigger issue for you. Sometimes the easiest approach of opening a line of communication with the author can go a long way, “you know, X, we prefer to initilize our variables this way.”
Other times you may need to look past them especially when a suggestion has been made and ignored or worse turned the author defensive. The third option is to look for a pattern and refactor the code. In a past project I took a minor annoyance of comment defined behavior sections and turned it into a feature that helped us identify issues in production as soon as they happened. We had a developer who made a habit of defining behavior sections in code using comments. Check out this Java Spring controller:

I was once a part of a software project started from scratch and lucky enough to see it grow from our company as our first client and then outside clients afterwards. We took the lean software approach where we deployed often, GUI’s frequently contained large amounts of changes, and we communicated regularly with our clients to make sure our goals were still meeting their needs. We weren’t deploying as much as Flickr, but we had a twice a week deployment schedule.

I took C++, BASIC, and HTML in high school. Sometimes I was the only female in the class and sometimes there were others, but I never really paid attention to them. My goal was always showing up the guys in the class. If I could go back in time, I would give myself the following advice:

Sendash is an application to monitor a network’s health. This includes everything from change management to verifying status checks of VMWare, Palo Alto, network config, etc. The goals are: store the data that vcheck sends as a daily email, display the info and changes updates if something fails to check in Install automatically on the hardware devices and update when necessary Our use case is a group of consultants that receive a very long set of emails every day on the health of each customer’s network. This application will solve the problem of allowing the consultant to see what has changed at each site and if any site fails to check in to the new application. The install scripts to create the health check are going to be configured by a web service. These scripts will live on the above mentioned hardware and are required to not install anything such as Python, BASH, git, and anything useful (/wink), and since they are Windows boxes will be written in PowerShell.

The programming field has a stereotype of severely lacking inter-personal skills whether it’s being extremely introverted or an extroverted arrogant jerk. I don’t feel as though I have worked with either extreme, but every one of us (yes myself included) can use some time working on soft skills. These skills include, but are not limited to personalities, communication, personal habits, communication friendliness, communication, etc. that define relationships with their teammates. With the exception of the people making money off mobile apps and games and the occasional single developer team for a company, if you are going to write software more than likely you are going to work with a team and communication if you didn’t notice the triple mention above is one of the most important part of being a good teammate.

Hello Internet! This blog is up, running, and ready to cover development topics, testing, and my personal favorite - soft skills improvement.