A reader of Mastering Software Technique emailed me to ask:
You mentioned it’s important to find a source of feedback while learning. I am just starting out with programming, so any suggestions on where to get such feedback would be great.
It’s a great question! Here’s what I told him, plus a little...
I was talking with some folks lately about how Rails is amazing and unmatched for prototyping web apps. If you’re dealing with high market risk, you want to build a lot of prototypes, fast, at low quality, with the assumption that 90%+ of them will be thrown away because nobody will buy them. That...
Different people can look at, say, a video tutorial and take different things from it.
A new programmer looks at what the video is “supposed” to teach and learns the immediate skill and how to do something in that language or environment.
An experienced developer learning a new language learns how...
Awhile back a fellow asked me the best way to increase test coverage at the small startup he works at.
It’s an excellent question.
Specifically, he asked:
“What’s the best way to go about increasing the unit test coverage of a codebase at a small scale startup? What procedure do you guys follow...
Ruby 3x3 announced that Ruby 3.0 would be three times as fast as Ruby 2.0. It was an audacious goal, especially for a language released in 1995.
Ruby 3 is due to be released in less than a month. They’re hard at work on some of the features, but non-JIT performance is pretty close to release speed...
Rack is Ruby’s standard web interface. Rails uses it, Sinatra uses it, basically every Ruby web server and framework use it.
And Rack adds “middleware,” pieces of software that you can build an app out of. They see requests and responses, and they can modify both. Middleware is so powerful that Rails...
I’ve recently started a podcast called “Computer Science: Just the Useful Bits.” I interview a different professional developer, with a different background, each week. They’ll let you know what parts of their education they think were good, which were bad, and which were worth emulating.
“When are...
