Why we branch the code

Branching is a great workaround for problems elsewhere in the system that we are unable or unwilling to fix.

Rapid feedback

One of the key things we’re trying to get with Agile is faster and more effective feedback so that we can make better decisions. This extends into to the technical practices just as much as it does in our meetings and processes.

Building capacity when hiring juniors

My comments yesterday on social media about encouraging the hiring of juniors seemed to resonate. So let me tell you about two of the very best teams I’ve worked with. Two teams of juniors, that were freshly hired, many straight out of school and none of them having worked professionally for long.

CI is not a server

We often hear things like “we’ve set up CI”, which makes no actual sense when you consider what CI is. It’s not a server or a tool, Continuous Integration (CI) is an ongoing practice whereby we keep the code continuously integrated. That sounds simple but has more subtlety than you might expect. Many places today that think they’re doing CI, actually aren’t, and as a result aren’t getting the benefit they could.

Too many branches

Most companies have too many active branches in their code repositories. “Active” meaning we’re doing actual development on them.

Test driving prime factors in Go / Testify

This article will show how to “test drive” the prime factors kata in Go with Testify. Testing in Go is built right in, which is great. It’s a very bare-bones implementation though so adding Testify to the mix makes it a lot easier to write your tests.

How often do we run our tests?

Today, automated tests1 are fairly ubiquitous in software projects. That is, almost every project has a large number of automated tests and that they tend to get run by some continuous integration (CI) server.

  1. More precisely, what we’re talking about are automated checks, not tests, but the agile community has never adjusted to using the more precise language so I’m going to keep calling them tests here. ↩

Improvements in CSS: Dark mode and CSS variables

Ryan and I started working on dark mode support for jirametrics and have discovered that CSS now has much better support for this sort of thing than it’s ever had in the past. Specifically, the latest versions of all the main browsers, now support dark mode directly, as well as CSS variables, which simplifies much of the configuration.