Ben Carpenter

When you come up against a problem to solve and you don't know how to solve it immediately, you have two choices: 1. Ask for help. 2. Don't ask for help. Technically, these two options complement each other, so as long as you have the asking ability, you always have that choice. Whether you know how to solve your problem immediately or not. Or whether you'll be able to solve it eventually or not. Or whether you have a problem or not. But lets not dwell on technicalities. Benefits of asking for help: 1. It can be the most efficient way from where you're at to where you want to be. An expert can give you the answer, you can implement it, and you'll be all set. 2. It can be less confusing. If you have to sift through a lot of documentation or search engine results, you can get a lot of unnecessary information that can cloud your reasoning and planning. When you ask an expert, they can see what you're dealing with and tell you only the information that's rele...

In a previous post, I talked about automating tasks to save time. Now I want to talk about a particular type of automation that I'm particularly geeked about at the moment: Continuous Stuff (my term, no one else's that I know of - there's probably a more technical term for it, but I don't know what it is). I will note that everything here is lifted from another article I read about a year ago and have been unable to find again and an Interview on the Developer Tea podcast, which I'll reference at the end. There are good articles about Continuous Stuff all over the place, so if you want to find out more about what it is, good practices, or good tools just search around. I would recommend searching for "Continuous Integration", "Continuous Delivery", and/or "Continuous Deployment". There are three levels of Continuous Stuff that I'll acknowledge for the purposes of this post: Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery Continuous Depl...

Being sick stinks. It's uncomfortable. It makes it hard to work. It keeps you from being around people, or at least makes you second-guess being around people, which can be stressful. My recommendation for this week: Don't get sick. And don't get other people sick. I'm out (and sick).

One thing that's nice about being a programmer is the ability to automate your own repetitive tasks. If you need to fill out a time sheet, then add up your hours for different tasks, you can program something to automatically tally that up for you. If you need to run a script on a client's data and send to results to their accounting department every week so they can verify everything is calculating correctly, you can write a small application that will run the query at the specified time, write it to a spreadsheet, and send off the email, such that you don't have to do anything with it anymore. It's a great time-saver and frees up your brain to do other important things. Over time, as you go through the process of doing repetitive tasks and writing software that automates tasks, you'll come to get a feel for what could be made automatic and whether or not it's worth it to implement that automation. Here are a couple of things to consider when deciding whether...

Details are important. Small problems can wreck a whole project if not handled correctly. A missed semi-colon can prevent code from compiling. I wrong dependency can cause your code to fail at runtime. An off-by-one error can cause your application to do all sorts of weird things. The big picture is also important. Not keeping track of where your project is going as a whole can result in a useless product. It can prevent you from completing your tasks. It can cause huge losses in time and effort. You may find yourself swept away with one of these and neglecting the other, either because you find one particularly fun and the other boring, or because you simply get in the zone or a state of flow and the other slips out of your mind. In my own experience, I've noticed that I tend to fall into the details (also, in my boss' experience; he's the one who initially pointed out that I have problem with this). I get stuck trying to figure out how to make one small thing work, not ...