The life-changing magic of tidying up legacy code. Do you have a junk drawer at home? You know, the one where you store all the miscellaneous and occasionally useful objects. When you open the drawer, you see multiple sets of scissors, safety pins, thumbtacks, rubber bands, receipts, spare changes, and…

Tips for accepting feedback with grace and dignity. Like writing, programming is personal and intimate. You pour your creativity and thoughts into a machine through your fingertips. It is no surprise, then, that you may feel a little angry when you read critical reviews on your code. How do you…

A primer on search algorithms: depth-first and breadth-first. Algorithms can be a nightmare if you only ever study them for exams and technical interviews. Wouldn’t it be much easier if you could have fun while learning algorithms? …

CSS grid, linear-gradient, neumorphism, and a moment in Go history. I was inspired to write about Go after watching The Queen’s Gambit recently. Something is alluring about learning a five-hundred-year-old chess opening move. The modern computer can simulate millions of game patterns in a fraction of a second. …

Tips for implementing pay transparency at your workplace. I spent three years building a human resource information system at a startup. Our team was in charge of building performance reviews, cascading goals, salary history, and other talent management tools. We also had to implement an incredibly flexible permission system to…

Elevate your skills with deliberate practice. In her book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth interviewed dozens of high achievers and noted the importance of deliberate practice in their successes. Below is how Duckworth describes the way experts practice: First, they set a stretch goal, zeroing in…

Tips for choosing your organizational designs. I first heard about Kent Beck’s product development triathlon metaphor in 2016 when he visited the ThoughtWorks office in New York. …

Tips for improving your coding style As a new programmer, you may find it frustrating to have to consistently write grammatically correct sentences in order for the computer to understand you. This is because — unlike human languages — programming languages are unforgiving. …

Solving the wrong problem is often more costly than building the wrong solution. As a software developer, I am a natural problem-solver. I take one look at a problem and immediately start thinking about how to solve it in my head. However, plunging head-first into a solution without seeing the…