11 Mar 2020

Tools I use at work

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What tools do I use daily at work?

  • Notion.so I use Notion.so to track my day to day tasks and their progress. I also use it to write down any idea I have during the day that I would like to explore at some point in the future. I've described my task management system in more details.
  • JIRA I work in a corporate environment, which means that we need to track tasks and assignments through a shared system. That system is JIRA. I don't particularly like JIRA after having used redmine for 5+ years and liking it. JIRA is slow, complex and cumbersome, which makes me avoid it at all costs. It's a shame, given that task management is one of the most important things in a software development business.
  • Visual Studio Code I use VS Code to take notes throughout the day as well as to edit files from time to time.
  • PyCharm My current job is mostly about writing python code, and PyCharm is the best IDE to do that. I use it to implement new functionality, write tests and debug issues. It is highly customizable which makes using it a joy. I also make use of the run/debug configurations regularly to test a variety of cases over the lifetime of the projects I work on. Finally, because I've used PHPStorm in the past, transitioning from PHPStorm to PyCharm was easy and painless.
  • iTerm2 I spend a good part of my day interacting with various CLIs. I use a Mac and the terminal simply doesn't cut it for me and I prefer interacting with GUI tabs over having a tmux.
  • Chrome Anyone doing software development spends a large portion of their time online looking for solutions to their problems/questions. I use Chrome mostly to use the Google suite, to use Jira/Confluence or to look at reports generated by the tool I work on.
  • Google suite (Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides) I work in a collaborative environment which means writing and reading documents to share ideas, data, requirements and notes with others.
  • Slack Working with others means communicating with others. While it's possible to talk directly to my teammates, sometimes it is more respectful to simply send them an instant message asking them to come to see you when they are available. Slack also allows communication with people in other teams, as well as people that are in separate offices.
  • GitHub We use git exclusively at work as a way to do version control. We use GitHub as our central location to share our repository, as well as to do code reviews.
  • Drone Whenever I push code to GitHub, Drone makes sure that a variety of tasks are executed to ensure code quality: linting, code formatting, type checking, unit/function/integration tests and documentation building. Having a build system reduces the time between faulty code is pushed to GitHub and the code being fixed.

10 Mar 2020

Wearing a face mask against COVID-19

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Should I wear a face mask against COVID-19 if I'm not sick?

Protecting yourself vs protecting others
Source: https://medium.com/@Cancerwarrior/covid-19-why-we-should-all-wear-masks-there-is-new-scientific-rationale-280e08ceee71

If you have masks already, wear one. It will protect you from others and others from you.

The official answer from the Government of Canada and the CDC is that wearing a face mask is not an effective solution to protect yourself against the virus.

If you are sick and you need to go out in public, wearing a face mask will help reduce the chances of spreading the virus to others.

If you want to avoid being ill due to the virus, the best way to do so is to avoid being exposed to the virus. This means staying at home in isolation.

09 Mar 2020

Criteria for using a library in a project

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What do I look for in a library before using it in a project?

It has to be maintained so that I know that issues are addressed.

It has to be supported so that I know I'll get help if needed.

It has to be highly used compared to other solutions to ensure it's more feature complete and of good quality compare to other libraries.

It has documentation so that I don't have to read the documentation to know how to use the library for common cases.

It has to have a simple API that does what I need so that I don't have to deal with weird/incomplete API that do half of what I need.

08 Mar 2020

Reducing your error rate

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How can I reduce my error rate when using my skills?

When using skills in which you can make mistakes, it is important to monitor what you do and where you make your mistakes. Like any performance optimization problem, you want to figure out where you make the most mistakes and where you'll benefit the most from fixing those mistakes. If you make the same mistakes 100 times at the cost of a minute each time, that may be preferable to making 1 mistake that cost 100 minutes to fix, given that once the mistake happens, the cost stays the same.

Document your skills. Write down what you do, when you do it (triggers) and what kind errors you make during those steps. Evaluate how many times you make that mistake and how long it costs to fix. Then when you use your skills, track when you make mistakes and how long it takes you to fix the mistake.

As an example, think of a software engineer doing code reviews. Reviewing code requires going through a variety of checks: is the build passing? is the functionality properly implemented? are there tests? are the new files in the proper location? Without a list, the engineer is left looking at the code without any clear checklist. If he is methodical he will have a list he goes through in his head. If not, then he will most likely only look at the code and give it a summary opinion, that is, whether he likes what he sees, or not.

Given a non-explicit methodology it is hard to assess where the mistakes are made and which mistakes cost the most to fix. If you don't check that tests were written for the new functionality or changes, what impact will it have in the future? Depending on how likely the code is to change, the likelihood that something gets broken may be significant. While adding a test may require a few minutes, one has to judge how much time would be wasted if a bug were introduced in the piece of code. As code complexity increases, so does the cost of fixing issues in that code.

With an explicit checklist you will be able to track the things that you want to verify before code is merged. As your checklist covers more and more cases, this list will reduce the likelihood that the person who wrote code made a mistake that gets to production. By the same token it will increase your effectiveness as a software engineer to produce quality code.

Is it possible to extract someone's beliefs by reading their writings?

Yes.

If someone has written a blog for example, it is possible to figure out a variety of information about them simply based on what is written in those articles.

If someone writes about a specific software, we may not be able to infer right away what they think about said software, but we know that they've spent enough time to learn a bit about this specific software. If we know all the other alternatives in this category of software, we could infer that the user believes that this software is possibly better than the alternatives, otherwise why would they have picked it?

If the writer writes a lot on a topic, that is also a clue about their beliefs. They probably think that this topic is important, hence why they write about it. Maybe they write about this topic because it is lucrative to them.

What the writer doesn't write about is also informative. If they write mostly about technology, maybe they don't care about politics or sports?

It is possible to extract if-then rules from their writings, which generally expresses some form of believe that if something then something else. There are other variants where only if is provided (if something, something else, or something else, if something).

A writer may use certain adjectives to describe things as "easy", "simple", "straightforward", "difficult", "impossible", "hard", etc. Those are also useful of indicators of the writer's beliefs.