Alexander Bird Software • Blog

Strategies for talking about those things that nobody wants to talk about

A pattern for practicing TDD when you don't know where to start

A pattern for sharing inventions between autonomous teams

When the API gives us too much info and we don't want to know about it

How to tank your maintainability by over DRYing your code

How ease of inline/extract refactoring impacts the inevitable readability of our code

From City Water Supply to My Kitchen Sink

Reducing Keystrokes and Supporting Refactoring

Coding Microsites and How We Use Them

Listing all the git changes across many repos from certain authors in the last week

Thirty-One Alternatives to Guessing What To Do Next

An argument for independent software teams

ng On Init, ng On Changes, and mock components

a Refactoring Pattern for RXJS

Notes while reading Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

On software encapsulation and tomato taxonomy

Not often useful, but when you need it it's helpful to know

Shaping our tools and processes to reduce risk in our work

How to combine multiple commits

When it's time to abandon your precious idea

Lessons from a visual artist on tackling overwhelming complexity

Technical strategies for tackling overwhelming lists of compiler errors

Distributed Monoliths, Harry Potter, and Half-Doing New Ideas

Finding the most maintenance-worthy code in the project

Notes while reading Switch

My current approach for guiding a group through their first time ensemble programming.

Leading change requires more than analysis and arguments

A mind map of things that I focus on at work

Approaches for increasing your tenure without collecting interruptors

(And what I do when I realize I've made them.)

Questions I ask my interviewers.

How to use ADRs to teach your peers, correct your mistakes early, and equip others to share ownership of what you build

What I do to create an environment where everyone gets to do interesting, valuable work

Describing two project archetypes: the tech-centric project breakdown, and the customer-centric alternative.

I've been thinking about how we decide what to do next, and how we share that with others.

Let's not take time making guesses that are more precise than their accuracy warrants.

An alternative meeting format for highly abstract or contentious discussions

How we reduced WIP/person from >1.5 to <1

A reductive visual summary of collaborative programming terms like mobbing, pairing, and swarming

An exploration of one dimension in the decision to build custom or to use an off the shelf component

Some things that I have found helpful to grow in writing code for humans to read

an approach (that I've found effective) for telling folks about tools & practices

Notes on cool things to do with the JSON processor tool

An inventory of my favourite side projects (for fun & learning).

Can you make a link shortener with just a DNS? Not quite.

Mob Mentality Show (guest appearance)

Questions for job candidates to ask interviewers

Links to resources and tutorials covering basic, (boring?), but essential skills for a software developer.

Troubleshooting your code and what to do when you can't

Books I've found helpful or want to read soon

Git suggestions for developers first starting on a medium/large team.

Getting the most from a quiet reviewer

To train me to write better commit messages

Communicating big-picture architecture with your team with automated tests