git

Communication, Practice Empathy

Adding more Empathy to Pull Requests

Using tools like GitHub or BitBucket allow developers to able to submit their changes through pull requests. One of the challenges with pull requests is that they often contain very little information, apart from the change itself and perhaps the issue or case in question. Bad pull requests make the lives of reviewers a lot harder, and mean they need to spend a lot of time understanding the context. Instead of focusing on the change itself.

So, how can you improve your pull requests? Continue Reading

Communication, Craftsmanship

Controlling the source of truth -The value of better commit messages

Working as a developer involves communication on many levels. We need to communicate with business stakeholders in a domain specific language, abstracting away much of the technical jargon. Team communication on the other hand is a lot more technical, and closer to our reality in code.

A lot of our communication is silent though. It happens through async tools like email, Skype or Slack. I’m sure that anyone that’s attempted communicating this way has experienced how easy it is to under-communicate, leading to a ping-pong of messages before the intent and understanding is conveyed.

The end goal of all this communication is software that delivers value to users.

Software isn’t finished when it’s been delivered though. It changes over time and with it loses its original intent. This leads to even more async communication, which can go over months or years. I’m talking about the communication that happens through the code we write.

Continue Reading