Matt

  • Contributing to More Open Source

    This week I expanded my daily Free Coding time to include some contributions to open source projects.  It just scratches an itch to continue my learning and reach out to find other skilled developers to help drive some additional expertise. One of my free coding scripts was to develop an interactive file template engine, that…

  • Move Fast, Break Things and Collect Data

    With the help of unit tests, BDD, Coverage reports, Continuous Integration, and Source code control it has become easier than ever to build code that is robust against regressions while letting you branch and play with ideas quickly and without risk.  However there are times when the scale of code use in production requires a…

  • Finding Opportunities to Open Source

    There are so many good reasons to open source code. Gain contributions from the wider community Contribute back for all the awesome you’ve gotten from Open Source To build the status of yourself or your company Attract the best programmers Get public feedback on the quality of your software More people will use your software open…

  • Getting my Git On

    For the past week I have been trying to be more active on GitHub.  I’m writing code every single day in an effort to boost my presence and learn a few new things. GitHub has created a social network around writing software which serves as a productive (and necessary) tool and also as a portfolio…

  • 5 Reasons You Should be Free Coding

    Free coding is the practice of writing code quickly off the top of your head.  It should be done as part of a daily ritual for at least 10 uninterrupted minutes.  The goal isn’t necessarily to produce something useful or even complete.  You should strive to open the taps of originating thoughts in your head…

  • Building Things Quickly

    Developer productivity is a  perpetual area of improvement. Finding better tools, new abstractions, learning shortcut keys and using modern project planning is a way to continually get better at your job.  The goal of doing all that is to produce better software faster. Choosing the right tool for the job plays a big part. Lets…

  • Slot Machines

    For the last couple of evenings I have been learning about slot machines and how they work.  There is actually quite a bit more to them than first meets the eye. I have a side project going to build a slot machine server application that can simulate many kinds of slot machine games.  Given the…

  • Building Social Services

    Technology is getting more and more personal. As it does such it becomes easier to make things social in a real way. Bringing a social experience to your application is more than just slapping a like button somewhere. Social is about making people aware that when they use your application they are entering a social…

  • 1 Thing Programmers Should Do More Often

    This past week I found myself with a task of creating pages on this site for all the Mobile Apps that have been developed by Halotis Inc. At the same time I wanted to get the marketing material organized for all of those apps in a consistent directory structure. Which lead me to something I…

  • Life to Old Projects

    Maintenance.  UGH! We live in a world where software is part of an every evolving ecosystem of other software.  Everything is constantly changing and everything you do needs to keep up or risk falling into disrepair and creating technical debt. The maintenance window is a chance to breath fresh life into an otherwise languishing project.…