14 Yes/No Questions to measure your team

4/19/2015 · 8 min read

Someone reminded me recently of The Joel Test, which is 12 yes or no questions to rate a software development team’s ability to perform. They’re looking a little tired and old now, I thought I’d attempt an update, so here’s 14 yes or no questions to testing how well your team is able to perform. Like the originals, these are hardly scientific, and fairly opinionated. Are you providing a pleasant work environment?

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Cyclomatic Complexity

4/10/2015 · 4 min read

Imagine you’re having a great day at the office, you’ve got a brand new feature the customer is dying to have, and you’ve completed it in record time. You’re all ready to get it merged and peer reviewed. So you commit it, and push it to your build pipeline, where it’s analyzed. The build fails. Your analytics tool tells you complexity is too high! You’re given a numeric complexity value for your code, and a lower complexity value that you need to get your code’s complexity under.

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Coming out as Trans as work

4/5/2015 · 1 min read

I’ve made a short video about my experiences coming out as a trans woman at work. It’s something that I’ve wanted to talk about for a while, but I don’t think would fit in at a conference. I’m putting this out there because I want trans people who’re thinking about transitioning at work, particularly in the UK, and particularly in software to know they’re not alone, and that if I can do this, they can too.

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Skipping Packages with Composer

3/27/2015 · 2 min read

Just a quick note, if you find your project doesn’t work with a specific release of a package that you’re pulling in with composer, maybe due to a bug, maybe due to an accidental backwards compatibility break, you don’t need to lock composer to a specific version. You can tell composer to skip a single version, or range of versions. This allows you to avoid the situation where you can no longer pull in bug fixes or performance enhancements.

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