C#, SQL, Episerver/Optimizely, performance, and beyond
Elena’s a strong, independent woman, with her own motivations and thoughts. She’s indeed attractive (very attractive if you think about Uncharted 4), but in terms of being healthy and fit, not being overly sexy as a “fan service” (Japanese games, I’m looking at you)
She’s not some female characters who are over-confident, and/or over-powered, to the point they don’t even need men. She does not work alone. She works with Nathan Drake to overcome the odds.
This is the second part of a series about most important skills for developer. The first part, about searching for answer skill, can be read here.
Searching for the answer is usually the fastest way to solve a problem
But searching on Google might not be enough to find you the answers, you might be the first to encounter the problem, or you might be searching for the wrong keyword. Sometimes, you have to ask the questions, hoping that some one, some where does know about the problem, and is kind enough to spend some time reading your questions, and typing the answers.
For free.
Being programmer(*) is hard.
Being a good programmer is, of course, even harder. Unlike countless other jobs where the daily work is a routine, and being good at your job is to be efficient at that routine, being programmer is all about constantly learning and doing new things. Being a good programmer is about being fast at learning, and doing new things well. The process might stay for a while, but the content of the job is constantly changing. (If you keep doing same content over and over again, you are doing it wrong)
Continue reading “The most important skill (of a good programmer)”
If your site has exceeding ads all over places, or you ask me to disable my ad-blocker, then no.
If your site ask me to subscribe to your newsletter after 5 seconds, even before I read your post’s title, then no.
If your site has auto-play videos that continue to play even if I scrolled down, then no.
If your site has no comment section, then no.
If you don’t moderate your comment section and it’s full of spam, then no.
If your site open pops up, then no.
If you site doesn’t have HTTPS, then that might raise suspects. (Yes you should look up in the address, this site is not HTTPS-enabled, and that’s entirely my fault, but I would never ask for your information more than a name and an email address (you don’t have to give a real one)). I know, I should have spent time to enable HTTPS on this site, I’m just too busy writing content (another way to say I’m lazy). (I added HTTPS now, isn’t it nice?)
This is the third part in a series
Git in easy steps – amend and stash
Then what is a branch in Git, actually? A branch in Git is simply pointer to the hash of a commit (which will be the HEAD commit of that branch), and a name of your branch, of course. That means creating a branch in Git is extremely cheap and is almost instantous.
Now if you look back at the branch tree in Git Extensions, you will see a linear tree. (It’s not something you usually see in your working environment, but we’re new anyway.). You can see that the name of the branches and the commit message are in bold.
For the commit, it means the commit is the HEAD commit of a active branch. A commit will always point to it parent (or its parents, in case of a merge). When you know the HEAD commit, you can know how does your branch look like, down to the initial commit (which has no parent).
This is the second part in a series
Git in easy steps – amend and stash
Sometimes, you make a mistake committing something. A file can be missing, or the indentation is not perfect, or you had a typo in your commit message. If you are using some other source control softwares such as Team Foundation Server you’re done with that. The only option you have is to check in another change set to fix your previous one (in case you have a typo in your commit message, be done with that). Git is so much more powerful in terms it allows you to rewrite history.
To fix a commit, make a change, then commit as usual, but this time, Select the “Amend commit” checkbox:
Always think twice before doing this
This is the first part in a series
Git in easy steps – amend and stash
The war of version control systems was over. Git has won. And that is not an over-statement. CSV, SVN, TFS were the past. Mercurial was close, but GitHub put the end of it. The popular of open source platform makes Git an unambiguous choice for almost every developer in the field . Even BitBucket, the service which once known for Mercurial, supports Git for now. If you start a new project today, Git should be your first and foremost option – well, unless your boss says otherwise.
But the end of a war does not mean everything else is settled. The war of Git clients continues. How many Git clients do we have? I lost count, but at least: Git bash (with comes as the default), TortoiseGit, SourceTree, and of course, Git Extensions. It reminds me a lot of the JavaScript frameworks’ war recently: “There are too many frameworks out there, let’s create a new one to rule them all”. Of course, Git clients’ war is in much smaller scale (You won’t see new Git clients every week), but that does not make it less intense. Git clients are used in a daily basis, and it really affects your productivity, and in some way, your moral as well.
No I’m not talking about becoming a “developer” like Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg, or even someone less “famous” like Linus Torvald or Anders Hejlsberg. Man, I’d give up many things to become one of those. To become such successful developers, you must be extremely talented, extremely determined, and of course, a sizable amount of luck. I’m talking about an average human being, trying to become a person who can enjoy his work (and hopefully, provide his family with that work).
Somebody might think, it’s easy to be a developer today. Most problems can be found on the internet – by searching Google, or asking questions on sites such as StackOverflow. Some might even jokingly define “programming = copy and paste answer from StackOverflow”, but we all know that, it takes more than that.
I’ve been trying to answer that question. I’m not a great developer by any mean. A decent, at most (My boss has been saying that I’m doing a very good job, I truly hope he’s not just being nice). It’s been 14 years since I get into programming, 10 years since I made the final decision to be a programmer, when I chose the faculty at my university and 6 years since I began my professional career as a developer. It’s been all natural to me – what does it take to be a decent developer?
It’s never been easier to be a developer. With the availability of Internet these days, for almost anywhere, anytime, it’s just few clicks away to find the answer of your question. With proper keywords, especially when you have an error message, Google can lead you to the answer within a fraction of second – mostly StackOverflow, or some other websites/blogs that the people have already answered it.
If you want a more specific question where you can’t find an answer to, you can simply ask. It’s free. The days of Expert-sexchange are long gone. People around the world are willing to help you, without knowing who you are – they jump into your question, read it, guess it, understand it, ask something to clarify, think about a solution, possibly try it, post it to you.
They spend time, their precious time, to make your life, just a little easier.
And they don’t charge you a penny. Perhaps they like solving problems. Perhaps they like helping people. Perhaps they like the reputation count in SO. But in the end of the day, you don’t have to spend a bunch of money a professional consultant would cost you.
Joel test scores are widely accepted as the “12 golden checks” for interviewee to ask interviewer during an interview. They were originated by Joel Spolsky – and his blog was famous among developers, they were quite well-known – and have been popularized even more with StackOverflow (where Joel Spolsky is one of the founders). StackOverflow Jobs even have a check list for recruiters when they post their job vacancies. Here’s the list:
The list served its purposes for a long time – and I can say it, to a point – contributed to software industry. When developers are aware of such things, companies need to adapt to attract talents – resulting in better work environments and processes (again, there are companies which do that well before the list, and there are companies do not care about it at all).
Continue reading “Joel test scores are (somewhat) outdated – you should ask something else”