software engineering 👩‍💻 💯
Dec. 19 • Advice for new software devs who've read all those other advice essays
Don’t underestimate the value of digging into history to investigate some bugs
I’ve always been pretty good at debugging weird issues, with the usual toolkit of println and the debugger. So I never really looked at git much to figure out the history of a bug. But for some bugs it’s crucial.
I recently had an issue with my server where it was leaking... See more
I’ve always been pretty good at debugging weird issues, with the usual toolkit of println and the debugger. So I never really looked at git much to figure out the history of a bug. But for some bugs it’s crucial.
I recently had an issue with my server where it was leaking... See more
Marcus • Marcus' Blog
Never be afraid to say that you don’t know something
Don’t be afraid to ask for help
We all suffer(ed) impostor syndrome
Don’t be afraid to ask for help
We all suffer(ed) impostor syndrome
Ólafur Waage • Advice to new Programmers
Make debugging easier
There’s so many little tricks I’ve acquired over the years on making software easier to debug. If you don’t make any effort to make debugging easy, you’re going to spend unacceptable amounts of time debugging each issue, as your software gets more and more complex. You’ll be terrified to make changes because even a couple new... See more
There’s so many little tricks I’ve acquired over the years on making software easier to debug. If you don’t make any effort to make debugging easy, you’re going to spend unacceptable amounts of time debugging each issue, as your software gets more and more complex. You’ll be terrified to make changes because even a couple new... See more
Marcus • Marcus' Blog
Don’t compare yourself to others, compare yourself to where you were in the past.
Ólafur Waage • Advice to new Programmers
Julia Evans once said "behind every best practice is a horror story." If you don't understand a Best Practice, look for the horror story that inspired it. It might make the best practice make sense. It might turn out to be something that's completely irrelevant to you, and then you can feel comfortable doing a different practice instead.
Dec. 19 • Advice for new software devs who've read all those other advice essays
When working on a team, you should usually ask the question
There’s a spectrum of “trying to figure out everything for yourself” to “bugging your coworkers with every little question”, and I think most people starting their careers are too far on the former side. There’s always someone around that has been in the codebase longer, or knows... See more
There’s a spectrum of “trying to figure out everything for yourself” to “bugging your coworkers with every little question”, and I think most people starting their careers are too far on the former side. There’s always someone around that has been in the codebase longer, or knows... See more
Marcus • Marcus' Blog
- People don't listen to me because I'm a good programmer, they listen to me because I'm a good writer. The same is true of pretty much everybody you'll read. This doesn't mean you should automatically reject everything, but it means you should carefully think about it and evaluate how it applies to your situation. And take any argument about
Dec. 19 • Advice for new software devs who've read all those other advice essays
This pattern (set up, do work, clean up) is common across many different problem domains, so Python has a language feature to help with it. Context managers, defined using the with keyword, manage the setup and cleanup processes. Python's file objects support them, as do most database libraries.