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Samuel Taggart

Samuel Taggart

GDevCon N.A. conference attendees standing in front of several trees showing fall colors - orange and yellow.
Announcements , Conferences

It's all about the people

So many times we try to tackle problems by throwing more technology or more process at them. Everything would be fine if we just used this new tool or followed this process. Technology and process can definitely help things to run smoother, but only if we first address the underlying
2 min read
The Arc of a Developer
Coding Philosophy

The Arc of a Developer

In my recent interview for Legacy Code Rocks, I talked about the arc of a developer. I feel like there is this trajectory that people that go on over their careers. It's the learning and growth path that developers tend to follow.
4 min read
New Website
Announcements

New Website

We've moved our website from WordPress to Kajabi! In the move process, some things may have broken or disappeared. If you find any broken links, please let us know.
1 min read
Technical Debt In Practice
Book Reviews , Software Engineering

Technical Debt In Practice

I met Julien Delange a few months ago. He runs a company called codiga.io It is a support tool to help developers write better code. It is a web-based tool that acts kind of like VI analyzer and will analyze your code and flag problems and make suggestions. It
3 min read
Bug Bounty BootCamp Book Review
Book Reviews

Bug Bounty BootCamp Book Review

Being a programmer, cybersecurity is an important topic. I’ve been interested in it for a while. I listen to Security Now and Darknet Diaries and have been to various hackathons. I even signed up for HackerOne. I felt like I’ve just been dabbling in it though. This book
3 min read
Character Sets
Sam On Joel , Software tools

Character Sets

So here is another article inspired by Joel on Software. In this article, titled The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!), Joel talks about the importance of understanding Unicode and character sets. It is a bit of a rant (Joel
3 min read
Simplicity of Design
Frameworks , Book Reviews

Simplicity of Design

I recently read XP Explained. It had a section on page 109 where it talked about simplicity. I often talk about the importance of simplicity. In fact, it’s on my list of fundamental assumptions about coding. In XP Explained, Kent Beck lists 4 criteria to evaluate how simple a
6 min read
Sandworm
Book Reviews

Sandworm

Given all the stuff going on in Ukraine right now, this is a highly relevant book. The author tracks down a group of Russian Hackers called Sandworm (a reference to Dune). They are part of the GRU. They were responsible for a variety of attacks, mostly centered around Ukraine and
1 min read
XP Explained
Book Reviews , Coding Philosophy

XP Explained

This book is considered a classic for a reason. It’s inspired a lot of coders over the years. I think the first time I had heard about it was from Stephen Loftus Mercer talking about pair programming. I’ve heard a lot about XP over the years since then
2 min read
Rename AF Message
Software tools , Frameworks , OOP

Rename AF Message

I inherited a project written using Actor Framework recently. I started to do a little refactoring to make it easier to add some of the changes I needed to make, following Kent Beck’s idea of “First make the change easy, then make the easy change.” What is in a
4 min read
The Object Oriented Thought Process
Book Reviews , OOP

The Object Oriented Thought Process

This book was recommended to me by 2 different people. Several years ago Nancy recommended this book to me when I was first learning OOP. I generally trust Nancy’s recommendations (she has made some very good recommendations in the past such as XUnit Test Patterns and Continuous Delivery) and
7 min read
Innaugural GDevCon N.A. Recap
Conferences

Innaugural GDevCon N.A. Recap

It took a while, but I finally wanted to get around to writing a recap of GDevCon N.A. I was waiting until we got all our videos back and uploaded to our YouTube Channel. See below. If you missed anything, you’ll definitely want to check those out. Presentation
3 min read
Premature Reuse
Software Engineering , Coding Philosophy

Premature Reuse

Premature Optimization Premature Optimization is a phrase that is often heard in software engineering. It’s where you envision some potential performance bottleneck, so as you are writing the code, you go out of your way to create the most optimum code (ie written in a way that the compiler
6 min read
Re-Humanizing The Workplace
Book Reviews

Re-Humanizing The Workplace

I’ve known Chuck Blakeman for many years. He runs a group for business owners that I participate in called 3to5 Club. There is an educational component, but it’s really just a business owner’s support group. It’s a place to get together and talk about all the
2 min read
TLDR
Software tools , Linux

TLDR

I’ve been doing a bit of Linux work lately, and I’ve stumbled upon this thing called TLDR, so I thought I would share it here. Manpages If you do much Linux work, one of the first things you should have learned about was manpages. This is the Linux
2 min read
2022 Goals
Goals

2022 Goals

Every year I find it useful to sit down and set some goals for the year. It helps to give me some direction. I usually split them into business goals and personal goals. I also typically put together a reading list for the upcoming year. Here are my goals for
4 min read
2021 in Review
Goals

2021 in Review

Each year I like to sit down and review the year. See what worked and what didn’t. I find it’s a nice way to wrap things up. It also helps to prep and set goals for next year. I’ll start with a recap and then look back
9 min read