Shambling Towards Perfection

Lately I've seen a lot of new/aspiring developers talk about difficulties learning git . I was confused at first, because there are approximately a zillion git tutorials out there. But then I started really looking at what people were saying AND what all those tutorials contain. The problem is most tutorials start out with "here are a ton of git commands to memorize", and this is not where people are having problems. People are having problems with "what is git, why should I learn it, and what does it look like to use it in a real-life project?", and those questions are largely not answered in all those millions of tutorials. So at the risk of redundancy, I'm going to attempt to address these questions in Yet Another Article About Git. First, I want to make it clear that if you want to be a programmer, any kind of programmer, you need to know git. You just DO. This is the short version of the answer to "why should I learn it?".  The medium length a...

I started this book waaaay back in the good ol' days, BC. Before Coronavirus. And then the pandemic struck and blew up my placid dev existence. On Friday, March 13, 2020 at 4pm NMSU finally decided to allow us those of us who wanted or needed to, to work from home. I took the weekend plus 2 days to get my home office set up; I had a feeling this was going to go on longer than any of us thought at the time. That decision has paid off in spades as I was able to get a pretty sweet dedicated workspace set up, with a corner desk, my 2 personal monitors, my work monitor, my work tower, a printer/storage cabinet, and a new laser printer. Oh, and a nice office chair and one of those carpet protectors. Current me is very grateful to past me for having that forethought...  Anyway, I officially started working from home March 18. By that time NMSU was no longer "allowing" us to work from home by choice, but instead sending everyone possible home. In less than a week we had to move n...

This is one of those things that I never gave a second thought to. Growing up in New Mexico, there were more tech jobs in government than in any other industry. White Sands Missile Range, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, not to mention state, county, and city jobs. My dad plus many of my friends' parents worked in tech for the feds. While there are more and more tech companies moving in, government is still a major player in the area and probably always will be. But that was just my experience. In many areas the tech industry itself is much more prominent, and of course those jobs are the ones that get all the press. You rarely see articles about working as a software developer at the IRS, or something like that. It's always Google or Amazon, a start-up, etc. To many people, being a software developer is synonymous with working in the tech industry. So when Jenny Chan, who founded the Women in Web Dev community, contacted me to ask if I'd do an interview fo...