Written by Matthias Noback
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on Mar. 16, 2022
Years ago my co-worker Maurits introduced me to the term "magic" in programming. He also provided the valuable dichotomy of convention and configuration (or in fact, he'd choose configuration over convention...). I think this distinction could be very helpful in psychological research, figuring out…
Written by Matthias Noback
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on Feb. 1, 2022
Last year I had a video call with Tomas Votruba, creator of Rector, who kindly took the time to explain a lot of things about this project. We finished the call and I couldn't wait to tell my partner how nice it was. I said to her: we should have recorded it, I'm sure it would be useful for other…
Written by Matthias Noback
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on Jan. 31, 2022
The one simple trick to do a better job as a programmer is to git commit as if your commit could be accidentally deployed (and it wouldn't break the production environment...) Why would this improve your work? Because it pushes for improvements in several areas. If a commit needs to leave the proje…
Written by Matthias Noback
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on Nov. 12, 2021
Paradigm; a nice word that means "a theory or a group of ideas about how something should be done, made, or thought about" (Merriam-Webster). In software development we have them too. From the philosophy and history of science courses I've followed, I remember that scientists working with different…
Written by Matthias Noback
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on Oct. 14, 2021
It's an extremely common problem in legacy code bases: a new way of doing things was introduced before the team decided on a way to get the old thing out. Famous examples are: Introducing Doctrine ORM next to Propel Introducing Symfony FrameworkBundle while still using Zend controllers Introducing…
Written by Matthias Noback
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on Sep. 21, 2021
I've mentioned this several times without explaining: the rule that every class should have a test, or that every class method should have a test, does not make sense at all. Still, it's a rule that many teams follow. Why? Maybe they used to have a #NoTest culture and they never want to go back to…