Doing Things Better

What does “doing things better” mean? Its a question you might ask. It means that just because something works, doesn’t mean its right. It means that you should be open to change. It means that, in the end, we are never perfect and can always improve.

Jun

2015

PyCharm and Version Control

So, you want to add your PyCharm project files to a VCS but you constantly deal with problems because each of your team members have different names/locations for their project interpreter. There is a rather simple solution to this problem. Basically, at the project level, PyCharm only cares about the name of the interpreter, not the location. Follow these instructions to give your interpreter a name that is consistent across developers and then use that in your project files to fix the issue.

Open PyCharm
Select File >> Settings (or Configure >> Preferences if you don’t have a project open).
Search for the Project Interpreter setting (this will also work if you don’t use the project interpreter in your run configurations).
Hit the little gear box next to the project interpreter then select More.
Select the interpreter from the virtual environment of your choice and hit the edit button.
Now give it a unique name (preferably identifiable and related to your project.
Now, select that unique name as your default project interpreter or your run configurations.
Commit
Make sure each team member does the same.

Now whenever you update or commit, you won’t constantly see changes associated with people selecting their interpreter.

If you want to know more, I definitely recommend reading a thread over at Jetbrains’ Support.

May

2015

Not Invented Here, Not Written By Me, and Reinventing The Wheel

Not invented here and not written by me are both driving factors in reinventing the wheel when developing software.

We limit ourselves if we do not build upon the achievements of others. – Chad Dotson

Not Invented Here

I’m sure everyone has encountered developers that would prefer to implement everything themselves instead of using a library. An example would be not using jQuery or underscore (or comparable libraries) on a web project.

This is a serious problem for several reasons.

It needlessly increases development time.
It potentially leads to less robust code and/or increased testing time.
It potentially leads to less maintainable code.

I’m not saying that libraries should always be preferred over your own code, but they should be strongly considered. If you choose to re-implement what a library gives you, you should prepare some defensible reasons for not going with the library.

More: Wikipedia

Not Written by Me

This is a more refined, narrower case of Not Invented Here. Those developers who don’t want to spend the time or have difficulty understanding code written by others often reimplement code because they view it as the simpler solution. This is a falsity and they hurt their overall code quality and momentum for it.

Some common things you will hear are:

I don’t know what that code does.
I would spend a shorter amount of time rewriting it. (Which is most likely a falsehood.)

The Core of the Issue

As I’ve said, I think the core of the issue is that we find it harder to understand what someone else writes vs what we write ourselves. We must apply programming best practices and resist the urge to reimplement the past. To grow, we must push past our tendencies and continue to move forward to bigger and better things.

Apr

2015

Decisions in 1 Pomodori

All programmers suffer from analysis paralysis at some point in their career. The trick is bringing it to a swift conclusion. Try this to move forward next time. Give yourself 1 pomorodi (25 minutes) to analyze the problem. After that make a decision and go with it. Whatever falls out is whatever falls out. At least you were not over-analyzing the problem and getting nowhere.

Mar

2015