Thinking S.R.P. in S.O.L.I.D.

You're no doubt familiar with SOLID, a set of guiding design principles for OOP meant to help create more maintainable and scalable software. I was recently talking with someone who was having a hard time understanding SRP in practice. I figured they probably weren't alone as I recall having not

Playdate Group 4 Represent!

I've made my first game for the Playdate! Behold: Actually, that's not fair, this is actually a game that they've made, but I'm responsible for the sprite that I doodled that's  moving around. This is the result of this script in their excellent docs. Panic is a fantastic group of

Initial Impression of Claude.ai

Recently a friend introduced Claude.ai from Antrhopic to our chat. I've not found myself with the correct combination of time, energy, interest, and motivation to get back to my elxrBB project, I still think about it, though, and would like to focus there, but it is hard when it

Iteration v. Recursion

I was chatting recently with another engineer who was sharing  their desire to have started working through leetcode problems sooner in their career. They, having recently been let go from their gig, like so many folks I know, are working toward leveling up while on the hunt for their next

The Power of Psychological Safety in High-Performing Teams

I have wanted for awhile to re-visit the topic of Psychological Safety after my previous post on the topic to create a slightly more succinct an thoughtful post. Here it is: In the corporate world, the pursuit of high-performing teams is a top priority. Many businesses focus on acquiring top

alt-LGTM 👍

Recently a colleague metioned they thought LGMT stood for Let's Get This Merged and I'd always thought it meant Looks Good To Me. This amused me so I asked ChatGPT for some additional examples and there's some real gems in here: Leverage Global Talent More Love Grows Through Music Light

2023-04-23 - project blog - elxrBB- Entry #2

What a journey this has been. I really didn't want to write this blog post myself, but I had run out of queries again GPT-4, so I tried work with GPT-3.5 to produce a blog post for me instead and, after several iterations back and forth about what I

A Year Later: Still Burnt Out

Introduction Burnout is an experience that many professionals face at some point in their careers. A year ago, I took a drastic step to address my burnout, stepping down from an Engineering Manager role to become a Senior Software Engineer. While this decision was beneficial in many ways, I continue

2023-04-02 - project blog - elxrBB- Innaugural Entry

Having reached the end of my first weekend collaborating with ChatGPT (GPT-4), I wanted to take a moment to reflect over the experience thus far. I’m referring to an ambitious project called elxrBB, which I’m almost certain to eventually abandon due to OSTD (Ooh, shiny thing! Disorder) but

A Swift Dive into the Gang of Four Design Patterns

The Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns are a collection of 23 time-tested software design patterns, introduced by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides in their seminal book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". These patterns provide a common vocabulary and best practices for software developers,

Types of Tests in Laravel

Laravel is a popular PHP web application framework, and testing is an essential part of its development process. Laravel provides a suite of tools for creating and executing tests, making it easier to ensure your application works as expected. Here's a breakdown of the different types of tests you might

The Value of Making Mistakes

Mistakes are how we learn. From the time that we’re young, we make mistakes as we try to understand and interact with the world around us. Making mistakes is a vital part of our growth and forms the foundation for our successes. Mistakes help us to discover our limits,

debugging

Me: Add An Admin, Ghost: Oh, Actually I'm Broken

TL;DR Mail settings were broken :rolleyes:

The Value of the Retrospective (by ChatGPT)

I, like many humans, have been interested in ChatGPT and have toyed a bit it as a "writing partner" Recently I tried to get it to generate a couple blog posts for me. I think it actually did a remarkable job. The following prompt was written after I'd worked with

Psychological Safety (by ChatGPT)

I have begun to toy with ChatGPT, like so many others out there. It's a fascinating technology. It's shocking how often it's been wrong, it's fascinating to have it offer code and concepts that are just fundamentally flawed, and I'm blown away when it's racist, sexist, or mysognist: it feels

How to Create Bootable USB in Linix Terminal

TL;DR: `sudo dd if=distro.iso of=/dev/sda status=progress`

Building a New Routine

There’s much that needs doing. Always. You could fill every moment of every day working toward any number of endeavors, and it seems almost impossible, sometimes, to stop and prioritize. How do you stack rank the improvement of your health when compared to the possibility of retiring, for example?

Mental Health Crises Aren't Convenient

Or: That One Time I Went Crazy (again) I'm thankful for the existence of FMLA [https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla] knowing that my job is protected (or at least as protected as possible under the law). I'm worried about the fact that my only advocates are myself, my

die Überarbeiteteers

The overwork exhaustion It turns out there’s a German word for when your burnout is from working too much. I find that I am not suffering from such a burnout, exactly. Mine is more a “too much across too many things for too long” sort of burn out. I

Engineering Control

It’s interesting to me to think about my job as “Engineering Manager” and the words “Engineering” and “Management”. Then I think about what might it mean to engineer management? We do that through process. Through trial and error. Through iterative adaptation. Today I spoke with a fellow traveler on

javascript

Web Scraping 101

Sometimes you might want to get some data from a webpage, and sometimes you might want to do that using some code.

In Linux, Jobs are Useful!

One of my favorite features of POSIX systems is the ability to make use of jobs for multi-tasking. Often I have seen other devs who, for a variety of reasons, may just not know their way around this functionality.

Bremerton

On Falling in Love with Your Town

There is something magical about actually falling in love with where you live. Loving Where You Live A shot of a journal page about this very topic!Necessary backstory... ??? I have been trying to move to the Pacific Northwest for a very long time. So has Manda. Since we both

Zoom

Unnecessary Zoom Fatigue

It happens, the unnecessary zoom [https://twitter.com/JillKrajewski/status/1357331466221453312], and it’s pretty frustrating. > when it should've been an email pic.twitter.com/C1eJFX8tyT [https://t.co/C1eJFX8tyT]February 4, 2021 [https://twitter.com/JillKrajewski/status/1357331466221453312?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw] It’s frustrating because you can’t

Leadership

Leadership: People & Process

It's About the People, Stupid It’s easy to lose sight of the people element. Recently I attended a training led by Bill Joy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy] who reminded us again how important it is to coach the person not the problem. This is a common