As the brains behind the latest and greatest app, you’ve built something that people will hopefully use a lot. No matter how much work you can put into hunting down potential problems before you launch, though, those users are bound to have problems. They will use a variety of systems, with obscure hardware or operating [...]
A quick reader’s guide: Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review, by Jason Cohen, Steven Teleki and Eric Brown It’s hard to argue against instituting a policy of reviewing each line of code your team produces. Yet actually putting such a policy into place is difficult — some coders will even fight back against the [...]
A quick reader’s guide: Silicon Prairie’s coverage of Big Omaha Big Omaha is an amazing conference on innovation and entrepreneurship, smack dab in the middle of the country. Today’s the last day. Even if you weren’t able to attend, however, go through Silicon Prairie’s coverage of the three day event. There are videos of some [...]
A quick reader’s guide: Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, by Robert Martin Can you tell, at a glance, the difference between good code and bad code? We’ve all been in situations where any code that runs is good code, yet there are some very bad examples of coding that can still work. [...]
Deciding just what to charge for software is something of a black art. It’s particularly hard when you’re offering a mobile app: there are people offering their apps for free, which is very difficult to compete with if you really want to make money on your work. Traditionally, prices have been tied directly to the [...]
A quick reader’s guide: Building a DevOps Culture, by Mandi Walls DevOps isn’t much use if you’re building a project all by yourself — but if you expect to scale the app you’re creating, thinking about DevOps early on is necessary. That means creating a company culture that can support integration and communication, as well [...]
There’s no point in creating software if you never ship it. The only way to really succeed it to get something out there, in the wild — that way, you can see if it works and decide if you need to keep improving it. As Jeff Atwood says, you have to “do it in public.” [...]
A quick reader’s guide: Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster, by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz How do you know if you’re working on a project that will actually turn into a viable company? The only way to predict is to look at the numbers. You’ve got to be collecting data [...]
In order to make money, you have to have a way for your customers to pay you. If you’re operating online, having people mail you checks just isn’t going to cut it. That means that you need to make sure that you get a reliable payment processor you can work with. But how do you [...]
Choosing whether or not to make your work available under an open source license is only complicated by the number of different open source licenses currently available: the BSD license alone has four versions that a coder might consider using. The Big Open Source Questions The big questions that you have to consider when deciding [...]
