Reframing Practice

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The cliché that practice makes perfect has slowly permeated almost every level of the zeitgeist. It’s a bit of a romantic notion to imagine that as long as you work hard at improving you’ll always improve. The principle behind the notion itself isn’t wrong, but it has some serious caveats which tend to be omitted. You may only be able to get better by doing, but you have to make sure what you’re doing actually teaches you something or you’re just treading water.… Read the rest

The Programmer’s Guide to Optimizing for Usability

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When you design software, you can’t just focus on the functionality of the product; you have to also focus on how it’s going to be used. What are you developing and who’s going to be using it? Most software engineers can answer the former, but struggle a bit more with the latter. Your users will ultimately determine how your program is actually used.… Read the rest

The Philosophy of Unit Testing

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Unit testing is an approach to software development which shifts from testing the entity as a whole to testing each unit of code at every level until you end up testing the whole. Small issues don’t snowball into larger issues if you catch them early. Less has to be reworked at each level of abstraction when tested correctly. You trade a little bit of speed in the development cycle in exchange for a much smoother, more predictable process.… Read the rest

Reading Your Way to Better Writing

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It’s easy to find yourself left without enough time in the night to sit down and read for a bit, especially if you write. You have to hunt for topics, and research them. Then, for what actually works you have to sit down and actually write, edit, and create or find other media. Each of these steps can take a significant amount of time which eats into your time to do anything else.… Read the rest

RSS In 2020

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RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is a format which makes it easy to see updates to websites, blogs, news, and all sorts of other content. RSS allows the aggregation of feeds from a plethora of sources with rich content. It was created to make tracking content updates easy, but grew into one of the best ways to keep up with current events before disappearing from the limelight.… Read the rest

What’s Happening With Google in France?

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Google’s trouble dealing with the EU isn’t new, but the battle has just taken a whole new direction. Shortly after the passage of the General Protection Data Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, a copyright act was introduced. France has decided to be the first one to really challenge the search behemoth to try and squeeze money out of them for their links.… Read the rest