Weekly Dev Tips

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 55, on the Interface Segregation principle. Interface Segregation Principle This week's tip is brought to you by devBetter.com. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers You can find help and advice all over today, from twitter to Stack Overflow to various Slack communities. These are great, but if you need more, if you need someone you can count on when you reach out for advice on code or your career, check out devBetter.com. Read the testimonials. Join risk free and see if it's for you. Not only will you learn from me, but if you stay for a while you'll grow and begin to be a mentor for others, gaining valuable confidence and experience. I've watched it happen. Show Notes / Transcript Returning back to the next SOLID principle, this week we're on the I as in Interface. Yes, it's the Interface Segregation Principle! Or ISP for short. Let's start by defining what this principle says. ISP states that

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 54, on customizing key bindings in Visual Studio with guest Kendra Havens. Customize Key Mappings with Kendra Havens This week's tip is brought to you by devBetter.com. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Need to level up your career? Looking for a mentor or a the support of some motivated, tech-savvy peers? devBetter is a group coaching program I started last year. We meet for weekly group Q&A sessions and have an ongoing private Slack channel the rest of the week. I offer advice, networking opportunities, coding exercises, marketing and branding tips, and occasional assignments to help members improve. Interested? Check it out at devBetter.com. Show Notes / Transcript This week's guest tip is from Kendra Havens. Kendra is a program manager at Microsoft on the .NET and Visual Studio team, where she focuses on the Visual Studio testing experience and productivity tools. She does videos on .

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 53, on the Liskov Substitution principle. Liskov Substitution Principle This week's tip is brought to you by devBetter.com. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Need to level up your career? Looking for a mentor or a the support of some motivated, tech-savvy peers? devBetter is a group coaching program I started last year. We meet for weekly group Q&A sessions and have an ongoing private Slack channel the rest of the week. I offer advice, networking opportunities, coding exercises, marketing and branding tips, and occasional assignments to help members improve. Interested? Check it out at devBetter.com. Show Notes / Transcript We're in the middle of the SOLID principles this week, with the only one who is named after an individual. The Liskov Substitution Principle is named for professor Barbara Liskov, who teaches computer science at MIT. She gave a conference keynote some years ago in whic

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 52, on feedback loops and continuous testing with guest Al Rodriguez. Continuous Testing Continuously This week's tip is brought to you by devBetter.com. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Need to level up your career? Looking for a mentor or a the support of some motivated, tech-savvy peers? devBetter is a group coaching program I started last year. We meet for weekly group Q&A sessions and have an ongoing private Slack channel the rest of the week. I offer advice, networking opportunities, coding exercises, marketing and branding tips, and occasional assignments to help members improve. Interested? Check it out at devBetter.com. Show Notes / Transcript This week's tip is on how to be more productive by reducing feedback loops. Our guest is Al Rodriguez. Al is a multiclassing wizard spending most of his time using .NET wherever possible but levels up in other tools to get the job done. Ta

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 51, on the Open/Closed principle. Open/Closed Principle This week's tip is brought to you by devBetter.com. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Need to level up your career? Looking for a mentor or a the support of some motivated, tech-savvy peers? devBetter is a group coaching program I started last year. We meet for weekly group Q&A sessions and have an ongoing private Slack channel the rest of the week. I offer advice, networking opportunities, coding exercises, marketing and branding tips, and occasional assignments to help members improve. Interested? Check it out at devBetter.com. Show Notes / Transcript My goal is to have every other tip for the next few weeks focus on one of the SOLID principles. If you're listening in order, which I recommend, you'll note that episode 49 was on Single Responsibility. Thus, here we are with episode 51, talking about the O in SOLID, the Open/Closed P

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 50 with some guest tips on Testing All The Things! Test All The Things This week's tip is brought to you by devBetter.com. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Are you a software developer looking to advance in your career more quickly? Would you find a mentor and a group of like-minded professionals valuable? If so, check out devBetter.com and read the testimonials at the bottom of the page. Sign up for a risk free membership if you're interested in growing your network and skills with us. Show Notes / Transcript I'm glad to have a new guest offering some tips. Corey Weathers of Twilio is going to offer his perspective on the importance of software testing. Corey loves .NET and has worked for companies including Microsoft and the US federal government before joining Twilio as a developer evangelist. He works to inspire and equip .NET developer, underrepresented developers, and the Twitch commun

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 49 on the Single Responsibility Principle. Single Responsibility This week's tip is brought to you by devBetter.com. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Are you a software developer looking to advance in your career more quickly? Would you find a mentor and a group of like-minded professionals valuable? If so, check out devBetter.com and read the testimonials at the bottom of the page. Sign up for a risk free membership if you're interested in growing your network and skills with us. Show Notes / Transcript The Single Responsibility Principle, or SRP, is the S in the SOLID principles macronym. The short version of it is that a class should have only one reason to change. Specifically, the reason referred to here is tied to the application's requirements. Each class should only be required to change in response to a single change in the application's requirements. These requirements typically co

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 48 on Effective Ways to Accelerate Your Career, with guest James Hickey. Effective Ways to Accelerate Your Career This week's tip is brought to you by devBetter.com. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Are you a software developer looking to advance in your career more quickly? Would you find a mentor and a group of like-minded professionals valuable? If so, check out devBetter.com and read the testimonials at the bottom of the page. Sign up for a risk free membership if you're interested in growing your network and skills with us. Show Notes / Transcript This week's tip is brought to you by guest James Hickey. James is a software developer working remotely in eastern Canada. James helps software developers gain traction in their careers with his free email newsletter, "Navigating Your Software Development Career", which I link to in the show notes. He's also the author of an open sou

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 47, in which we'll introduce the SOLID principles. I'll spend a little time reviewing these principles in the upcoming episodes. What are the SOLID principles of object-oriented design? Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Are you a software developer looking to advance in your career more quickly? Would you find a mentor and a group of like-minded professionals valuable? If so, check out devBetter.com and read the testimonials at the bottom of the page. Sign up for a risk free membership if you're interested in growing your network and skills with us. Show Notes / Transcript Depending on how long you've been programming, you may have heard of the SOLID principles. These are a set of 5 principles that have been around for several decades, and about 15 years ago someone - I think it was Michael Feathers - had the idea to arrange them in such a way that they formed the macronym SOLID. Prior to tha

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 46, with guest Jamie Taylor, aka GaProgMan. On The Importance of Sleep Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Are you a software developer looking to advance in your career more quickly? Would you find a mentor and a group of like-minded professionals valuable? If so, check out devBetter.com and read the testimonials at the bottom of the page. Sign up for a risk free membership if you're interested in growing your network and skills with us. Show Notes / Transcript This week's tip comes to us from the UK, where fellow podcast host Jamie Taylor lives. He has a great tip that will help improve your health and productivity. Take it away, Jamie! Hello everyone, I'm Jamie "GaProgMan" Taylor, I'm the host of The .NET Core Podcast, and Steve has graciously agreed to let me share a tip with you all. My plan isn't to talk to you about .NET Core or even development, per se, but I might use them a

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 45 on working alone with a mystery guest. Working Alone Show Notes / Transcript This week's show was recorded on 1 April 2019 with a special guest who has chosen to remain anonymous. I'm a developer with a regular day job, but at night I do freelance work in the shadows. I mostly right wrongs committed (to source control) by other developers, so the people who use their software can sleep better at night. I work alone, and have a secret identity to protect those closest to me. And because I signed a strict employee agreement with my day job and I don't want them to find out about my moonlighting activities. My tip to other developers: work alone. After years of working with other team members, I can tell you it's for the best. My team members at my day job are like my personal nemesis. There's this one guy who doesn't take the work seriously enough. He refuses to follow team conventions. Half the time it seems lik

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 44 with some guest tips on working from home that I hope you'll find useful. Working From Home Tips Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Are you a software developer looking to advance in your career more quickly? Would you find a mentor and a group of like-minded professionals valuable? If so, check out devBetter.com and read the testimonials at the bottom of the page. Sign up for a risk free membership if you're interested in growing your network and skills with us. Show Notes / Transcript This week we have a special guest, Andrew Lock, who like me does a lot of work with ASP.NET Core. Andrew, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself for our listeners, and then just go right into the tips you'd like to share. Hi, my name's Andrew Lock, I'm a developer and author of the book ASP.NET Core in Action. I live in Devon in the UK but I work for a company in London. I work 100% remotely, which i

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 43, with a quick story about dependency injection. A Dependency Injection Story Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Are you a software developer looking to advance in your career more quickly? Would you find a mentor and a group of like-minded professionals valuable? If so, check out devBetter.com and read the testimonials at the bottom of the page. Sign up for a risk free membership if you're interested in growing your network and skills with us. Show Notes / Transcript A few years and several businesses ago, my wife and I ran an online ad business, Lake Quincy Media, that served banner ads on software developer web sites like W3Schools, www.asp.net, and ASPAlliance.com. I wrote the original ad serving software for the company, and over the years as we grew we built a team and rewrote it a couple of times. We were using ASP.NET, what would now be called web forms, at the time I first really un

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 42 - the answer to life, the universe, and everything - with some guest tips on learning TDD and Lisp. Learning TDD and Lisp This week we have a special guest. He is the author of the books Clean Code, The Clean Coder, and Clean Architecture, all of which I think should be required reading for professional software developers. Robert C. Martin, aka "Uncle Bob", is here to share a couple of tips for software developers. You'll find him online at @unclebobmartin on twitter and at cleancoder.com. We'll jump right into his tip after this quick word from this week's sponsor. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers Are you a software developer looking to advance in your career more quickly? Would you find a mentor and a group of like-minded professionals valuable? If so, check out devBetter.com and read the testimonials at the bottom of the page. Sign up for a risk free membership if you're int

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 41, in which I'll talk about the difference between sprint and iteration-based software processes compared to continuous processes. If you’re enjoying these tips, please subscribe in your app. You can leave a rating and better yet, a comment in your app, too. I also accept subscriptions to @WeeklyDevTips on twitter and comments and requests for topics there or in the show comments, too. Thanks for all of your support! Sprints Versus Continuous Flow Sprint and iteration-based processes are stepping stones on the path from waterfall toward continuous flow. In this episode we'll make some comparisons to build and integration processes to demonstrate this. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers If you're not advancing as quickly in your career as you'd like, you may find value in joining a semi-formal career and technical coaching program like devBetter.com. devBetter is a small group of motivated dev

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 40, in which I'll talk about the paradoxical advice, "if it hurts, do it more often." If you’re enjoying these tips, please subscribe in your app. You can leave a rating and better yet, a comment in your app, too. I also accept subscriptions to @WeeklyDevTips on twitter and comments and requests for topics there or in the show comments, too. Thanks for all of your support! If It Hurts, Do It More Often I've meant to do an episode or article on this topic for a while. It's advice I've been giving to my mentoring and corporate clients for years. Let's dive in after a quick plug for this show's sponsor, devBetter. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers If you're not advancing as quickly in your career as you'd like, you may find value in joining a semi-formal career and technical coaching program like devBetter.com. devBetter is a small group of motivated developers meeting every week or tw

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 39, in which I'll talk a bit about how to make code reviews a little less painful of an experience. If you’re enjoying these tips, please leave a comment or rating in your podcast app, tell a friend about the podcast, or follow us on twitter and retweet our episode announcements. There are millions of software developers in the world; help me try to reach a few more of them with these tips. Better Code Reviews I wrote an article about a year ago about Positive Reinforcement in Code Reviews. It generated a lot of feedback (on twitter if not in the article itself), so I thought I'd dedicate a Weekly Dev Tips episode to the topic. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers If you're not advancing as quickly in your career as you'd like, you may find value in joining a semi-formal career and technical coaching program like devBetter.com. I launched devBetter a few months ago and so far we have a small gro

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 38, in which I'll offer some personal productivity tips. If you’re enjoying these tips, please leave a comment or rating in your podcast app, tell a friend about the podcast, or follow us on twitter and retweet our episode announcements. All these things help increase the reach of this podcast, so more people can benefit from these tips. Getting stuff done Occasionally I get asked questions like this one that came from a LinkedIn connection. He wrote, "how in the world do you accomplish so much? Would love to know the strategy." I'm flattered of course, but it's not the first time someone's claimed to be impressed by how much I get done, so I thought I'd share a bit about my approach. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers If you're not advancing as quickly in your career as you'd like, you may find value in joining a semi-formal career and technical coaching program like devBetter.com.

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 37, in which I'll talk a bit about how I debug problems I find in my code. If you’re enjoying these tips, please leave a comment or rating in your podcast app, tell a friend about the podcast, or follow us on twitter and retweet our episode announcements. All these things help increase the reach of this podcast, so more people can benefit from these tips. Debugging Tip This week's tip is by request via twitter from Bernard FitzGerald (@bernimfitz) who wrote "How about an episode devoted to effective debugging? I think that would be interesting to hear your methodology of tracking down a bug." Well, Bernard, this bug's for you. Sorry, lame beer commercial joke. On that note, here's a commercial... Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers If you're not advancing as quickly in your career as you'd like, you may find value in joining a semi-formal career and technical coaching program like dev

Hi and welcome back to Weekly Dev Tips. I’m your host Steve Smith, aka Ardalis. This is episode 36, in which we'll discuss a question I recently received about guard clauses and exceptions. If you’re enjoying these tips, please leave a comment or rating in your podcast app, tell a friend about the podcast, or follow us on twitter and retweet our episode announcements so we can increase our audience. I really appreciate it. Exceptions and Guard Clauses This week's tip is on the topic guard clauses and exceptions. Specifically, whether and when it's appropriate to throw an exception in response to certain kinds of inputs. Sponsor - devBetter Group Career Coaching for Developers If you're not advancing as quickly in your career as you'd like, you may find value in joining a semi-formal career and technical coaching program like devBetter.com. I launched devBetter a few months ago and so far we have a small group of motivated developers meeting every week or two. I answer questions, review code, suggest areas in