Category — Development

This tip is something I learned watching my father growing up. He’s the Director of IT for the insurance division of one of the largest banks in North America, so I’m pretty sure he knows what he’s doing.

He was always a big advocate for spending time with his family, or at least being at home should anyone need him. To ensure that he could do this, he found a chunk of the day where he could be the most productive that wouldn’t take away from his time with anyone else.
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Problems are one of the few things we seem to never be in short supply of. Problem solvers, however, are more difficult to come by, and the reason for this is simple – most people don’t solve the real problem. They’ll come up with a short term patch and a clever spiel about how it’s the ultimate solution. Everyone then believes their hype and that’s that.

Two weeks, a month, or a year later the problem is back and twice as bad as it was before.
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Through my career, it’s easy to say that I’ve worked on hundreds of different projects for many different clients. Some for small companies with small budgets, small teams to get the work done and short timelines. Other projects are for large companies, with large teams and long timelines. The one connection between all of these projects is this: the documents can make them or break them.

Fear the docs. Fear what they can do to your project and your sanity.
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To a developer, their desk is like athelete’s equipment; vital to occupation. If a hockey players stick breaks because it’s quality is sub-par they could lose a game. The same goes to a developers desk, if the desk isn’t stocked with the correct equipment it could impair the developer in their work.

Here are 10 things that every developer should have at their desk.
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Software takes a long time to make. You first need to get the requirements from the client. Once you’ve gotten the requirements you then need to spend the time to properly design your product, drawing out paper prototypes, creating use case diagrams and other things like that.

Now that you’ve done all that, we’ll have a look at the third part of the Creating Software series: Starting to Code. Today we’ll look at different ways to code and the importance of testing as you code not afterwards.
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We, as developers, are required to be analytical to solve the problems that arise in day to day work. We use our analysis skills to break a problem down into smaller parts and offer solutions to each one, and in turn, create a solution to the larger problem.

While this is great, and it typically solves all the problems we run across, I’ve noticed that it begins to get into our code as well, making it overly procedural. We begin to think just like computers work – logical and procedural.
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Every developer I know has, at one point or another, used an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). IDEs make our lives easier, providing an all-in-one tool which gives you a text editor, compiler, debugger and many other things that help with development.

Without IDEs, you need to get all of the different tools and that can really clutter up your computer. Here are 6 of the best IDEs that I’ve stumbled across as a developer (in no particular order).
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Most programmers dread documentation. The thought of having to write anything but code makes them tremble (myself included). The reason is because it’s not what we’re good at, our job is to program, not to write docs for that code.

But what happens when our boss comes to us and asks us to write a user guide for our latest application? Below I’ll go into detail on writing great user guides.
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Have you ever had one of those days where you can’t figure out what you’ve been doing all day long? You get home wondering where the day went, and if you’ve accomplished anything. It’s a pretty crummy feeling, and I’ve been there many, many times.

After some reflection about how my “crummy” days went, I started noticing things that really reduced my efficiency. This is a collection of my findings; the things that helped me get more done and feel good about it.
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“A Healthy Developer is a Happy Developer”

This statement may seem a little cliche, but its 100% true. When I became a developer 5 years ago the first that that I saw decline was my health.

I started relying on energy drinks to get me through the nights of coding, fast food because I didn’t have time to eat healthier and less exercise because I spent so much of my time programming.

In the past few months I’ve been trying to get healthy again and I’ve come to realize one important fact: I’m much more happy now that I’m healthy. So here are my tips to stay health as a developer.
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