#development practices

Understanding #documentation for #developers #completedevpod

It’s tricky to get developers to write and maintain good documentation. Frequently, documentation has huge gaps in content, is woefully out of date, contradicts itself, or is simply impossible to navigate. Like writing code, putting together a useful set of documentation is not a natural talent, but is an acquired skill, usually built over long periods of time. Most of the time, the way you…

#unittesting and #tdd for #developers with @6figuredev hosts @matsubonsai and @claytonhunt_104

Most of us have tried to get better about unit testing, with varying degrees of success. Some folks even manage to succeed. Whether it is due to inexperience, frameworks designed without consideration of testing, or simple management resistance to regular testing, the challenges to getting it right are substantial. However, the rewards are great, which is why we’ve brought John Callaway and…

Hey Brad I am writing some code and in a review someone said I should add some log messages but I don’t know what I should be logging. What purpose do the log messages serve and what information should I be logging?

TL;DR See Summary section below

What is a log?

A log is a continual feed of what the application is doing; it’s the stream of actions being performed. A log has no beginning or…

What the Heck are Automated Tests?

Hey Brad we are being asked to write automated tests with every code change, this is just more effort which is slowing us down and I don’t see the value. What the heck are automated tests for?

I hear you, you spend all this effort making your changes and verifying they are working only to then have to go back and write a bunch of automated tests because you were told you should; what a bother.

T…

Here at Elevator Up, we have a fairly new development team. Each member of our team has been here for a year or less, with the exception of Andy, who’s been here just over 5 years. Although we’re still trying to tie down a few of our development practices, we have an incredibly talented team.

Over the past year, we’ve been heads down cranking out a few larger projects like Baker Book House and Sightline Dislay, which didn’t leave much time to improve our development processes. During this time, we also hired a few new developers. Our developers come from a variety of backgrounds: some from the agency world bouncing from project to project; some worked in the product world, focusing on a specific product; and some are fresh out of school. With the diversity of our backgrounds, each of us tend to approach development a little differently due to our backgrounds.

Now that we’ve gotten a few of our larger projects out the door, we're starting to take a little more time and evaluate our development tools and processes. We want to provide a consistent, repeatable approach to development, with guidelines and best practices laid out for us to reference, and pass along to any new developers that we bring on. This post kicks off a series of posts outlining how we develop at Elevator Up, and how we’re trying to document and update our processes along the way.

In the followup articles, we will take a look at things like: Elevator Up's Git workflow, a few tools of the trade along with some of their available integrations, and how we try to enforce code consistency and good coding practices in all of our projects.

One thing I constantly find myself doing is over-complicating things.