Soft Skills

Tips and tricks for exploring a new codebase

Published on: April 28, 2023

As a developer, joining a new project or company is often a daunting and scary task. You have to get aquatinted with not just a whole new team of people, but you also have to familiarize yourself with an entirely new codebase that might use new naming conventions, follows patterns that you’re not familiar with, or even uses tooling that you’ve never seen before. There are plenty of reasons to be overwhelmed when you’re a new member of any engineering team, and there’s no reason to feel bad about that. In the past two years, I’ve done a lot of...

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3 tips to work through a technical coding interview

Published on: September 7, 2020

If you're a programmer looking for a job it's very likely that you'll have to do a coding interview at some point. Every company conducts these interviews differently. Some may have you work through several heavy computer science problems, others may present you with a task that's related to the job you're interviewing for and others might do both. No matter what the exact form is, you'll want to nail these interviews as they are a big part of whether you'll get an offer or not. In my career, I haven't had to go through extensive coding interviews myself. That's...

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Five tips to help you become a well-rounded developer

Published on: June 1, 2020

This week I wanted to write about something non-technical. And while the topic of this week's post isn't a technical one, I think it's an important topic for developers who want to expand their knowledge, and deepen their skills. I have been a developer professionally for more than ten years at this point and in these ten years there are some fundamental lessons I have learned that I believe have helped me get where I am today. In this week's post, I will share five tips with you that have made into the developer I am today, and I strongly...

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Surviving a start-up’s bankruptcy

Published on: June 13, 2016

On a Tuesday almost two months ago, near the end of april, me and my coworkers received an email about an important meeting the next. We knew that something was going on, the look and feel of this email wasn't the same as usual. This one seemed a bit darker, a bit more serious. On Friday you could feel the tension in the office, people were speculating a bit and just acting different than usual. But we all had jobs to do and we tried to do them just like we always did. But it turns out that this tension...

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On variable naming when teaching

Published on: May 28, 2016

One of the hardest things a programmer has to do on a daily basis is naming things. Anything that we name will stay with us for a while and it's very likely that other programmers will have to use the thing we just named as well. So naming something properly is very important. It's often said that the two hardest problems in programming are naming things and cache invalidation. I tend to agree with that statement. A lot of times when I struggled with a piece of code, naming could have made my struggle easier. A function name like fetchData...

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Consistency and discipline over motivation

Published on: April 7, 2015

One of the beautiful things about being a developer is that many of us actually have the opportunity to take an activity we enjoy, and make it our job. Many developers are happy to do some extra work or learn something when they're at home or in the weekend just because they are so eager to learn and play. While this is pretty awesome, it won't last forever. You won't be motivated to learn every single day. Especially once you start doing development as a full-time job. I experience this as well, sometimes I have a couple of days or...

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Some tips for new front-end developers

Published on: March 23, 2015

You've decided you want to get into front-end development and you've managed to learn a few things. The time has come for you to get some working experience and start growing your career in a beautiful field. I was in that position not so long ago and I noticed that actually having a job and working is a lot different than writing code from the safety of your own environment. So how do you present yourself in a professional way? How do you make sure that you learn as much as you can? Today I want to share some of the...

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