Posts about Engineering Best Practices

Construction workers building a foundation.

What is Tech Debt?

Tech debt is a word that gets thrown around a lot in modern software development. If you're a software engineer, you might have a pretty good idea already about what tech debt really means. If you're not an engineer, you might just think it's a word that we tend to use when we want to be really convincing that a set of tasks should get done. 

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outstretched hand with water in the background, Narrowing Your Focus: The Key to Being a Successful Developer
November 7, 2017

Narrowing Your Focus: The Key to Being a Successful Developer?

I’ve recently come to the realization that I can’t work towards all my goals and achieve the progress that I need. When you’re actively trying to make progress on too many goals, it makes it harder to get to your milestones. You’re spread too thin. When you can’t complete milestones, you quickly lose the drive to work on anything. Before long, you’ll give up. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

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September 26, 2017

5 Tips for Writing Better Python

I’ve been writing Python for some time now, and when I reflect on some of the older code I’ve written… I sometimes cringe. For example, when I was just starting out, I wrote this Sudoku game in python (available on GitHub here). I thought that this was one of my better pieces of work at the time. It turns out I can’t even clone and run this because I didn’t add a setup.py or requirements.txt file, a mistake I would never make today!

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Why You Shouldn’t Import Functions and Classes Directly in Python

Why You Shouldn’t Import Functions and Classes Directly in Python

Today I was doing some programming, trying to finish up an old project that was 80% done, but I never finished. The project is an API for sharing beer ingredient data, being the avid homebrewer that I am. I was in the middle of writing some pretty simple authentication logic, when I found a weird bug in my code. The code, featured below, was pretty straightforward, or so I thought.

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Man drawing on a white board

4 Reasons to Separate Your Web App’s UI and API

Unless your web application is 100% client-side code, you should split it into a backend API and a frontend client. Too often people fall into the trap of believing that because they need a “quick” turnaround they shouldn’t spend the time developing a separate API and client-side app, or they believe that their application is small enough that they can get by without doing this.

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