Photo by ThisIsEngineering from Pexels As a contract programmer, I’ve worked at several companies “doing Scrum” – and seen many of them lose efficiency from a common problem. Here’s a small change in thinking that can eliminate the problem and increase your team’s productivity.   The situation At the end of the sprint, some of the stories are “done” – but have bugs or need new features that were discovered during development.   The ineffective “solutions” Usually, I’ve seen these “solutions” to this problem. The Manager, Product Owner, or ScrumMaster berates the team for violating t ..read more

These are the tech/programming things I want to work on in 2022. If you know of any good resources to help me accomplish them, please share them in a comment.   Reduce dependency on external services We’ve seen several outages of web-based services over the last few weeks. Over the years, there have also been countless issues with privacy and security of hosted data. I want to eliminate services I don’t really need and have backup plans for everything else. If you don’t have control over your data, is it truly “your” data?   Increase privacy and reduce being tracked online To paraphr ..read more

I started writing online programming guides over seven years ago – many of them for beginner programmers. Over the years, that’s led to more than two thousand comments on my sites, with quite a few of them asking for help with bugs. These are the things I try to keep in mind when answering programming questions.   Avoid saying “you”, “your”, and “I” Talk about the code, not the coder. For example, replace: “You need to rename the variable” with “Rename the variable” “Your function…” with “The function…” “I would…” with “Another possible way…” Depersonalizing the answer reduces the ch ..read more

I recently started memorizing digits of Pi. To test myself, I would write the digits on an index card, and compare what I wrote to a printout. This didn’t provide good feedback. If I was wrong about the 20th digit (for example), I wouldn’t know until after I finished writing all the digits and compared them. So, like any good programmer, I wrote an app to help. Here’s a screenshot of it.     Users enter values using their keyboard or by clicking on the calculator-like buttons. They can click on “H”, to get the next digit. If they enter an incorrect value, a popup will appear letting ..read more

A friend asked me how to create programming screencasts, like the ones I make here. If you want to make your own screencasts, this is how I make them, and the tools I use. I’m still working on improving the videos I make – both for my presentation skills and for the process of creating them. But, I think this is a good place for you to start figuring out how to make your own programming screencasts.   By the way, this is for recorded (and edited) videos, and not for live-streaming. I don’t think I’m ready to do live-streaming, yet.     Choosing a style for the video I’ve tried t ..read more

Photo by ThisIsEngineering from Pexels As a contract programmer, I’ve worked at several companies “doing Scrum” – and seen many of them lose efficiency from a common problem. Here’s a small change in thinking that can eliminate the problem and increase your team’s productivity.   The situation At the end of the sprint, some of the stories are “done” – but have bugs or need new features that were discovered during development.   The ineffective “solutions” Usually, I’ve seen these “solutions” to this problem. The Manager, Product Owner, or ScrumMaster berates the team for violating t ..read more

These are the tech/programming things I want to work on in 2022. If you know of any good resources to help me accomplish them, please share them in a comment.   Reduce dependency on external services We’ve seen several outages of web-based services over the last few weeks. Over the years, there have also been countless issues with privacy and security of hosted data. I want to eliminate services I don’t really need and have backup plans for everything else. If you don’t have control over your data, is it truly “your” data?   Increase privacy and reduce being tracked online To paraphr ..read more

I started writing online programming guides over seven years ago – many of them for beginner programmers. Over the years, that’s led to more than two thousand comments on my sites, with quite a few of them asking for help with bugs. These are the things I try to keep in mind when answering programming questions.   Avoid saying “you”, “your”, and “I” Talk about the code, not the coder. For example, replace: “You need to rename the variable” with “Rename the variable” “Your function…” with “The function…” “I would…” with “Another possible way…” Depersonalizing the answer reduces the ch ..read more

I recently started memorizing digits of Pi. To test myself, I would write the digits on an index card, and compare what I wrote to a printout. This didn’t provide good feedback. If I was wrong about the 20th digit (for example), I wouldn’t know until after I finished writing all the digits and compared them. So, like any good programmer, I wrote an app to help. Here’s a screenshot of it.     Users enter values using their keyboard or by clicking on the calculator-like buttons. They can click on “H”, to get the next digit. If they enter an incorrect value, a popup will appear letting them know ..read more