The SAS Workshops Blog (Page 5)

White tractor trailer driving up a road into the mountains

Blog Moved (Again)

The blog has now moved to blog.sasworkshops.com Sorry for the inconvenience. I'm working on redirecting all the old links.

Coding Philosophy

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.

A young boy with dark skin and curly hair covering his face with his hands.

Coding Philosophy

It's OK to Cringe

Cringing at your old code is actually a good thing. It implies that you've learned something. It is something to celebrate.

Interviews , Coding Philosophy , Legacy Code

Legacy Code Rocks

I was recently interviewed by Scott and Andrea of Legacy Code Rocks. We had a really great conversation about software engineering and dealing with legacy code. We hit on some important topics. It is worth taking a listen.

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.

Sam On Joel , Coding Philosophy

Painless Functional Specs Part 1

This Joel article came out after the Joel Test. One of the aspects of the Joel Test is having a spec. Apparently, Joel got some pushback on that so he launched into a series of articles on Painless Functional Specs. This is the first. A Product of It’s Time

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

Coding Philosophy

Do we really need more features?

Adding features adds complexity to our program. Is this new feature really worth it? We should be asking this question more often.

Continuous Integration , Unit Testing

What a crossword puzzle can teach us about programming

I enjoy doing the USA Today Crossword puzzle every day. It’s fun and I like to think it keeps me sharp. It’s also free. If you google it, you’ll find it rather quickly. This particular crossword puzzle has 2 modes: expert and casual. In expert mode, there

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continuous Integration , How to

More GitLab Runner Troubleshooting Tips

I’ve been writing a lot lately about Continuous Integration and using GitLab Runner. It’s really nice when it works and it works 90% of the time, but issues do pop up occasionally. They can be a pain to troubleshoot. I previously wrote about how to run GitLabRunner as

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

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

Continuous Integration , How to , SCC

Checking for New GitLab Releases

In my previous posts, I talked about automatic versioning and automatically creating releases. The next step is to create auto-updating code. By auto-updating I don’t mean code that automatically updates behind your user’s back ala Windows 10. You can do that if you want, but I believe the

Continuous Integration , How to , SCC

Automating Gitlab Releases

My previous post talked about versioning. I thought I would add to that discussion by talking about how I do releases and how I setup auto-updating in my apps, using the GitLab Package Repository. This a new feature I’ve started adding lately, so it’s still a work in