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In the early ’90s, with the internet on the rise, a group called the Cypherpunks emerged to defend digital privacy. They pushed for encryption and privacy tech, shaping our digital world with their vision and ideals.

When it comes to software development, trust and security are very important. One easy way to level up both is by using verified commits.

Whether you’re working on an open-source project or in a private company, verified commits can make sure your contributions are legit. Let’s break down what they are, why they’re important, and how to start using them.

bashunit is a lightweight, easy-to-use testing framework for Bash, packed with handy features like parallel and snapshot testing, test doubles, data providers, and tons of built-in assertions. Backed by clear docs and an active community, it’s become a favorite for reliable Bash testing. What started as a simple dev frustration has grown into an open-source tool that makes testing in Bash a lot easier and fun.

So, you’re a software developer, and you’ve mastered coding languages, algorithms, and all the tech stuff. That’s awesome! But here’s the deal: technical skills alone won’t get you as far as you might think. If you can’t work well with others, it doesn’t matter how great your code is — nobody will want to work with you.

Waterfall is like following a straight path where you move from one step to the next in a defined order — like water flowing down a waterfall through different stages.

The problem is that each step can take a lot of time and resources to complete. Plus, you don’t get feedback until the entire stage is finished, which can lead to a lot of wasted time. This is especially tricky in software development, where things are always changing and evolving.

Bitcoin is often referred to as “programmable money” because it allows for the execution of programmable transactions through its scripting language.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a hypothetical game set up showing a situation where people won’t want to work together even when it’s beneficial to do so. It’s just a long way of saying people don’t like to be taken advantage of.

Dozens of documents and spreadsheets, meetings over meetings, and yet without much impact, result in team misalignments—realized too late.

How we manage an organization defines its quality. Excellent management is crucial to avoid the Waterfall trap if we aim to build an Agile environment. But why would we want that? What’s wrong with the way we already work?

I wanted to learn a new programming language, so after trying some, I ended up with Golang as one of my favorites for its simplicity and capabilities. It has features I haven’t used in years, like multithreading and concurrency.

What is pair programming? Let’s first establish what pair programming is: Two people working together on the same problem at the same time. It is not about one person showing off their skills in front of another, nor one person afraid of making mistakes due to an impostor syndrome.

I have heard multiple times, from various people, the idea of panic towards deploying on Fridays. How good is that idea of banning the day before weekend from delivering new value to our clients or customers?

Coding is not just another job. In the right environment, writing software can be really fun and, even more, it can be your personal hobby as well! So… you might be focused on coding, coding and more coding to level up your own career skills.

In 1965, psychologist Bruce Tuckman developed a model (Tuckman’s Model) that describes the stages of group development, forming and maturing into a cohesive and effective team.

The model initially consisted of four stages: “forming, storming, norming, and performing,” adding one additional “adjourning” in 1977.

This is a question that I have encountered with some frequency for a long time. So I thought I would put together my thoughts on the subject here.

An unhealthy working environment can have various symptoms that negatively impact employees’ physical and mental well-being.

The Peter principle states that a person who is competent at their job will earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills. If the promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role, they will be incompetent at the new level, and will not be promoted again.

Last week, I was at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress, the biggest conference I’ve been giving a tech talk.

With more than 12k attendees, 300 speakers, and ~10 tracks in parallel, I was invited to give not one but two talks. One is about my experience with Extreme Programming and the profound benefits of embracing change in your work and life.

It is hard sometimes to get to bed with the mind blank because, more often than not, I think about my next reading, learning, talk, or what I will write this or next month.

Learned helplessness is the behavior exhibited by a subject after enduring repeated aversive beyond their control.

This will be controversial, but let’s talk about the QA position. The hidden truth behind the lack of software quality and why this should concern you if you write software.

To introduce a new tech stack for the entire team, it’s important to bring “why?” and a strategy to make it happen among the team because it will affect everyone.

I’ve got this question recently, a couple of times, and this is a great topic to share.

As business scales, the leaders’ primary focus must shift from customers to employees. Therefore, I would like to share what I consider critical points that any leader should address and focus on regularly.

For each key point, you will have book recommendations that go deeper into the matter, giving you references from real experts behind them.

My interview with devm.io regarding Agile and Extreme Programming.

Talking to a friend about agile, he asked me a fascinating question remarking how badly sometimes Agile and Scrum fit together, especially regarding meetings. These are my thoughts about this topic.

Let’s assume you already know what the agile manifesto is. Let’s consider that you apply most of the “extreme programming” values, principles, and practices. How can you work with other teams that aren’t agile?

I recently got a great question on Twitter which got me thinking for a while and I decided to share my thoughts about it.

Leadership is not a synonym for management, it has nothing to do with titles or personal attributes. So, what is it? How can we become leaders? And most importantly, why?

One of the most complicated challenges for everyone is avoiding misunderstandings and being aware that other people don’t think the same way as you do.

A triangle of time, quality and cost. it’s an indicator that these three parameters are interconnected. You can fix one or two of them, but not three.

We all have been junior developers at some point. This is easy to know because it is at the very beginning of your carrier. Your responsibilities were narrowed down by other peers who were looking after you.

The term was coined as a metaphor to illuminate Parkinson’s Law of triviality.

People within an organization typically give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships, in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

Revisited: 2023-03-23

Our software profession is constantly evolving; it demands a non-stop learning process. We must embrace the change in our industry.

Milgram was interested in researching how far people would go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming another person, and how easily people could be influenced into committing atrocities. For example, Germans in WWII.

There are two known schools in TDD: the mockist school (aka Outside-in) and the classicist school (aka Inside-out).

“Blue Work” and “Red Work” are concepts that David Marquet describes in his book Leadership is Language. Both require different mindsets and have different languages.

These are two different techniques. The key to each of them is about the mindset and context of what you want to achieve.

The complexity here is not about writing tests itself, but the habits that we have to change to create software that is easy to be tested.

The Trident Career Model by Patrick Kua has three tracks. Each track represents where people spend most of their time or energy.

To what extent do social forces alter people’s opinions? Which aspect of the group influence is most important — the size of the majority, or the unanimity of opinion?

What is Open-Source Software (OSS)? What are their benefits? How can you start contributing to any OSS? Pet projects? Knowledge sharing? Why all of these?

Let’s talk about the benefits of Pull Requests and Pair Programming, and my thoughts on these after some years of experience with them.

The book Who moved my cheese? presents a tale inside the main story that consists of 4 characters: two mice, Sniff and Scurry, and two little persons, Hem and Haw.

The new Functional Programming language build-in PHP. Check it out!

Mocking is useful, but “what to mock” usually turns out to be a bit more complicated than expected if you don’t treat this carefully.

Discover another way of sharing suggestions with your development team.

Using array_merge inside a loop is a performance killer. The spread operator will help you to improve this by flatting the array.

Argument unpacking, function variable argument list, and variadics function.

No goal should be an achievement on its own, but the process itself that helps us to go in the direction of these goals.

These tests are also known as Characterization tests.

In December 2015, PHP 7 introduced scalar type declarations and with it the strict types flag. What is this new feature?

If you see something, in the scope of your current task, that can be easily improved, improve it. And if you have any questions about it, ask.

Clear contracts, isolated side effects, testability, low complexity and cognitive load, code fluidity, and confidence in yourself.

Why you should consider testing as part of your daily development habit and how it’s directly linked to the software quality.

We have found ourselves attending a meeting that felt like we were wasting our time with a “monologue” that is either hard to follow or doesn’t seem so interesting as it could. Let’s fix this.