Tuesday 15 November 2016

In The Toolbox – Season Two

As I pointed out in my blog post that collates Season One of my In The Toolbox C Vu column I never intended to write more than a couple of introductory articles before handing it over for others to share their experiences. Yet now, three years later, I’m still plugging away at it and Season Three is already in the making with a couple of episodes already under my belt.

Just as before I also strongly advise you to become a member of the ACCU so you can get this, plus loads of much better content, which may or may not be published online by their respective authors. As I write this post it’s still only a measly £45 per year and is one of the last remaining printed journals about programming.

Anyway, here are links and summaries for episodes 7 through 12.

7: Feature Tracking

We have so many ideas for our products but only so many hours in the day to develop them. Sometimes all it needs is a simple text file in the repo, whilst bigger projects seem to demand an enterprise-grade solution like JIRA.

8: Taming the Inbox

Email is still the predominant means of [a]synchronous communication for many organisations and the barrage of messages need to be triaged if we stand any hope of separating the wheat from the chaff.

9: The Developer’s Sandbox

As programmers we need a safe environment in which to write and test our code, free from the distractions going on around us. When running the tests it should not be at the mercy of other developers running tests at the same time as us; first and foremost we start in isolation, if we can.

10: Dictionary & Thesaurus

One of the hardest problems in computer science is naming and yet two of the oldest tools used to solve this problem often lay dormant on the programmer’s bookshelf.

11: Finding Text

It’s a simple question: how do you find a piece of text? And yet there is a dizzying array of choices available that depend heavily on what’s accessible at the time and where and how that elusive text is stored.

12: Whiteboards

In the move to go digital the humble whiteboard has been pushed aside, which is disappointing as it’s still probably the best design tool available. It also has many other uses than drawing pictures of boxes, drums and cylinders.

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