TL;DR: My yearly performance review revealed that I have a tendency to over architect code. I write too much too early. Using the Pomodoro Technique, a few ground rules and a rigorous commitment to coding only what was needed, I created an iPhone app with a full stack backend in 20 hours over the course of 11 days. My wife and I are now using the app on a daily basis. All the code is open source and can be found here (server) and here (iPhone app). Background I work on a small development team for Didit, Inc. We are dedicated to an Agile methodology that suits our needs (mainly Kanban) and we have an...

Last week, all of us in the dev team at Didit got to go to the SCNA conference in Chicago. I came away very inspired with an expanded view of Software Development. Presentations from Bob Martin (Uncle Bob) and Zed Shaw (among others) focused on practicing coding like a musician practices their instrument and coding as often as possible (as opposed to getting mired in ideology and methodology). Among the things I learned was the idea of coding Katas. These are small, but often tricky, problems designed to hone coding skill, more so than to find a solution to the problem. It’s all about...

This post is about replacing the keypad on the game Dark Tower. If you’re not interested in my nostalgic blathering, click here to get right to the instructions. Nostalgic Blathering For those of you not familiar (because you’re too young or live under a rock), Dark Tower was one of the first interactive electronic board games that was massed produced. It was released in 1981 and I got one for my 13th birthday. It blew my mind – not only because it was fun to play – but because of the possibilities that electronics could bring to gaming. I had been hacking around on Pet...

Many of us in the nodejs community sat back and watched as the theatrics of last weekend unfolded. We read the posts and comments, sometimes laughed or just shook our heads – so silly. I’d like to present here our use of nodejs in a production environment. I’ll provide more detail below, but here is a summary of why we use nodejs for our web application and services layer: 1) Full BDD environment 2) Common language, from server to browser 3) Vibrant and growing open source community 4) Mature package manager 5) Functional programming is fun Behavior Driven Development BDD is the next...