Writing clear, concise commit messages enable you to work well with any team and get your best work out there.
Good commits can make the difference between a well-maintained product, and a terrible product. Well-written commits following a standardized format will enable viewers of your codebase to easily understand the type of change, what modules it affected, and why it occurred. Below, I will outline my format for commits, based on the Semantic Commits style popularized by the AngularJS team.
Most people don’t start thinking about their commits when they first start development (I get it, there’s a lot going on and a lot to learn)
But commits become especially important when you’re a part of a team.
When you…
Recording my finances in a personal cash flow statement and balance sheet enabled me to set better financial goals and a better budget.
Over the past year, I Went From Broke and Without Hope to Being a Financially Stable Person With a Working Budget. Since then, I’ve become ever more engaged in my finances and creating systems and habits to keep myself on track. That’s why when I went back to university part-time to finally complete my degree, I decided to take a personal finance course for my last ever undergrad elective.
University personal finance is more particular than one might get from reading, say, personal finance books. It’s aimed at economics students and future financial advisors.
Every new software project requires a version control strategy that suits a variety of needs:
- A locked down master branch that is always shippable to production
- Easy to follow for all development team members
- Creates a clean history that makes it easy to understand what changes occurred
As a bonus, the following strategy also enables effective code review, and the ability to create automated releases, versioning, and testing.
First, What branches are important?
Main
Your main branch is your source of truth for the current state of the application.
Any code deployed to main can (and should) be deployed to some form of production environment.
Changes being merged to main should already have undergone any checks or guards that your team…
In 2018 I was $47,000 in debt when I applied James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” and Jesse Mecham’s “You Need A Budget” to acknowledge my situation and make a dramatic change.
Like many, I have long struggled with maintaining finances. It began with taking on debt in the form of student loans to pay for school. By 2017, I found myself amassing a pretty significant amount of credit card debt.
I owed as much as $7,500 to credit in addition to my $40,000 student loan. Payday loans forced me into the most extreme version of paycheck-to-paycheck living. It seemed inescapable, using each new pay to repay the previous loan.
I won’t lie. This cycle took a long time, a promotion, and subsequent raise at work to eventually break out of. It…
As with any goal, in determining how to live a quality life, it’s important to begin with the end.
In this case, we would have to look at death. Specifically, what are the top regrets that people express on their death beds?
Luckily, an Australian palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, wrote the book on this topic. She recorded the wishes of many of her dying patients and wrote the book The Top Five Regrets of The Dying. Here they are:
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of…
There’s a moment, between getting on the bus to nowhere, and realizing you’re absolutely and totally lost during which you feel completely free. Before the fear sinks in that you may be in over your head, you want nothing more than to be just where you are. For me, this is that moment.
I’ve spent many years thinking about who I am. The problem is, I hated that person. He was boring and didn’t do a whole lot. He was successful at his job, but he really didn’t enjoy it. …
In this week’s episode of “Work in Programming,” we have senior software engineer and engineering manager, Kadi Kraman. Kadi is an emerging manager at Formidable Labs based in London, and recently created a React Native course on Frontend Masters.
In this week’s episode of “Work in Programming,” we have senior software engineer and engineering manager, Kadi Kraman. Kadi is an engineering manager at Formidable Labs based in London. Being in a management position, balancing time can be challenging but she enjoys it. 80% of the managers in her team are software engineers who also work on projects. Kadi attributed the success of projects to good people skills as communicating with the client, determining the requirements, figuring out their problems, and finding appropriate solutions, matter the most. …
In this week’s episode of “Work in Programming,” we have Thom Lamb to discuss the working dynamics of freelancing, agencies, and product companies. The conversation also sheds a light on the importance of finances and budgeting in freelancing and the preferred route for a software engineer entering the field.
In this week’s episode of “Work in Programming,” we have Thom Lamb to discuss the working dynamics of freelancing, agencies, and product companies. The conversation also sheds a light on the importance of finances and budgeting in freelancing and the preferred route for a software engineer entering the field.
You can watch the entire interview here, or read the summary below 🙂
Recruitment Dynamics in the Tech Industry
Start-ups are getting funding even if they are not viable. If you have an impressive background professionally, you would get funding, but it doesn’t mean the business model is viable. After COVID hit, companies that are not…
A great model for approaching personal development is to see yourself, your life, as a business. The goal of a business is to make profits, but also to re-invest its profits back into itself.
When most people think of investing, they think of investing in assets. If you own a house, you can invest in the property to increase the property value. If you buy stocks, you hope that the company will become more profitable over time, and your investment will grow.
What isn’t talked about enough is investing in yourself.
Many of us will have had experience investing in ourselves by paying for an education, but this is only one form of personal investment.
When I completed school, and set out to start a business, I quickly learned that a business requires investment…
I used the Medium Partner Program to gamify publishing content and make it fun. It’s helped me keep the habit up for 3 months, and earn money while I do it.
I’ve enjoyed writing for as long as I can remember. In public school, I would often write poetry or notes to self in the agendas our school provided. I’ve written in a journal every day for 6 years now. Writing things down has always been the easiest way for me to think and understand a topic. But, I’ve never considered myself a writer.
In some cases, I have even written entire articles in my journals. In fact, my most read article (Write Better Commits With Semantic Commits) was pulled directly out of a page in my notebook from 2018, touched…
Matthew Weeks
Software Engineer, Teacher, All-around fun guy
