I recently had the pleasure of attending the 2023 Polyglot Unconference in Vancouver, put on by the Polyglot Software Association. I’ve been attending these for years. It is my favourite local conference. An unconference, sometimes called an open spaces conference, is a participant-driven event where attendees choose the topics of discussion and provide the content themselves. They are meant to be...

Making a program work for the happy path is not always easy, but given enough time I believe pretty much anyone could do it. When a professional takes on the task however they will make it work for more than just the happy path, and do it with code that is easy to debug, and easy for others to understand and change. Since so much of what we end up dealing with are exceptional flows, we need a conc...

There are many things about producing video games that are surprising, but one of the weirdest has to be the approach to bugs. Like any piece of software, bugs are found through testing or user reports, triaged, then assigned to developers. Unlike normal business software they also ask the question, “is the bug fun?” There are plenty of unintended features (bugs) in games that became beloved. Atta...

Many years ago I worked on a program that had a serious problem: the users in one customer’s system were getting deleted periodically. When a user was deleted, any data linked with them was also deleted. We could restore the data from backups, but it was a difficult process, and having a system that loses data wasn’t great for our reputation, so we wanted to resolve it quickly. Our VP of developme...

Building applications can be tricky, and it’s inevitable that mistakes will be made. As a result, we programmers spend a lot of time fixing bugs. Sometimes they are easy, but sometimes they can be pretty tough to figure out. I’ve fixed a lot of bugs in my career, and to be honest with you, I usually enjoy the process. These days I am typically assigned the super urgent bugs that nobody else can fi...

Nobody likes bugs, least of all programmers. No matter how hard we try to catch them early, some will always escape into circulation. Until computers are smart enough to do what we meant instead of what we said, users are going to keep finding bugs, and we’re going to keep fixing them. Before a bug is fixed, it needs to be reported. Unfortunately it’s not uncommon to receive incomplete reports. We...

Developing software is an excellent career. Software has touched almost every aspect of our world, and its impact is always expanding. Many new things have become possible because of software, things that couldn’t have been dreamed of even ten years ago. The industry is continuing to expand. Tools are getting better. New opportunities are appearing everywhere… So why haven’t you gotten a promotion...

There are few things more refreshing than a cold glass of good iced tea. I’ve tried iced tea from a lot of places, but the best I’ve had to this day is my own recipe. It’s so easy that I can’t in good conscience keep it secret. It’s also far cheaper than anything you can buy in a can or bottle, and a lot healthier because it doesn’t require any kind of sweetener. The only down side is that it take...

It takes some time to integrate into a new team. I always feel like an outsider at first. As I build friendships and trust, I’m able to contribute with increasing effectiveness. Having noticed some patterns, I’ve been able to make the process faster and smoother using a few simple tricks. Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development describe what happens when a team is formed. His theory has four stages:...

When I was a child, I drank tea because my parents wouldn’t let me drink coffee. I would soak a tea bag in hot water until it made a dark, bitter liquid, then dump in milk and sugar until it was overly sweet, and mostly flavourless. I would sip it to fit in with adults, but I wouldn’t say that it was something I enjoyed. As a young adult, I tried loose tea on the advice of a friend. It was a total...