DevBlog about human aspects in programming
To remove unused local Git branches we can utilize git-removed-branches npm package.
First install it:
npm install -g git-removed-branches
Then if you want to detect stale branches run:
git removed-branches
To remove them run:
git removed-branches –prune
The command will remove local branches which have been deleted on remote repository.
Many developers are not native English speakers. Some special characters used in programming may be difficult to remember. Here is a list of special characters used in programming with their names in English:
| {, } | Braces, curly brackets |
| { | Left brace |
| } | Right brace |
| (, ) | Parentheses, round brackets |
| ( | Open / left bracket / parenthesis |
| ) | Close / right bracket / parenthesis |
| [, ] | Square brackets, brackets |
| [ | Open / left bracket |
| ] | Close /right bracket |
| ! | Exclamation mark |
| @ | ampersand |
| * | asterisk |
| – | Hyphen, dash |
| _ | underscore |
| = | Equal sign |
| : | colon |
| ; | semicolon |
| , | comma |
| . | Period, dot |
| < | Less than, angle brackets |
| > | Greater than, angle brackets |
| / | Forward slash |
| \ | Backslash |
| ~ | Tilde |
| ` | Grave accent, backtick, back quote |
List of containers: docker ps
List of images: docker image ls
Build container from dockerfile in current directory: docker build -t [container name] .
Run container in the background: docker run -d -p [container port] : [host port] [container name]
Get logs from container: docker logs [container hash]
Login to container: docker exec -it [container hash] bash
If you want to reject all changes in your local git repository you must:
To discard all local changes run:
git reset --hard
To remove untracked files run:
git clean -df
After executing these two commands you will have no changes whatsoever. If you run git status you should receive:
“nothing to commit, working tree clean”
A picture is worth a thousand words. Technical debt is what you see above. A temporary solution that over a period became a problem. Sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger. But the longer we wait the bigger is the risk it will explode and cover our business with odorous excrement. Moreover, like any debt, the longer we keep the liability, the bigger our payback will be.
You could say – who would be so careless to keep such a temporary solution for a long time! You are right. But as they say, temporary workarounds are the most persistent ones. Sometimes there is no time. Sometimes there are no resources. Later there is no time or resources to transform a temporary solution into something proper. Therefore, it stays with us. Until it becomes dangerous.
Technical debt exists in every IT project. In other forms, this phenomenon exists everywhere. In our home, at some messy place which starts to grow until suddenly we realize our whole apartment is a mess. In our body, where few cells grow out of control, and after many years we are diagnosed with cancer. In any business, where crucial operations are done by some single old person who suddenly dies or uses some ancient hardware that breaks and destroys the whole company.
Technical debt is a seed of chaos. The responsibility of software developers and IT managers is to keep it under control. Otherwise, we will be consumed by it one day. No matter the cost – let’s do not let it grow!
Problem: when we set a background image on div the div size doesn’t adjust to background image size.
Solution:
height: calc(imageRatio * 100vw);
Explanation:
First, we need to get the ratio from the background image. We simply divide one dimension by another. Then we get something like for example 66.4%
When we have image ratio we can simply calculate the height of the div by multiplying the ratio by viewport width: calc(0.664 * 100vw)
A height of a div is automatically updated when the window is resized.
See also: my answer on StackOverflow – https://stackoverflow.com/a/61990449/3775079
In particular, the sync engine of Google Drive app. It’s far from perfect, but the worst thing is when you, as a developer, accidentally leave some node_modules inside the synced directory. Then the whole thing literally explodes. As all of the devs know node_modules directory is the heaviest object in the universe…
When Google Drive tries to sync it we can go and grab a coffee. We can grab it from the plant in South America by swimming in a canoe through the ocean, wait until it grows, pick it, bring it to the USA or Europe or wherever we live, wash the beans, burn them, design our custom coffee machine, make a coffee, and then if we’re lucky we can go back to our computer and see the sync finished.
I tried to find a solution. I found this crazy discussion for example https://superuser.com/questions/820145/google-drive-with-a-gitignore-like-option. Poor admins build some custom scripts to make symlinks to the directories which they want to exclude from syncing. Or they remove the directories before running the syncing engine.
Therefore I’d like to pray to Google itself. Please, I beg you, oh mighty – add the exclusion mechanism to the Google Drive sync app so we can exclude the directories, files, anything, just like we can simply do it with .gitignore file. I know you’re busy, I know it might take a long time, but please. It will make the world a bit better place to live. Thanks in advance, Google 🙂
Japan has a fascinating culture. Esthetics, order, industriousness are its strengths. One of the biggest achievements of modern Japan is its automotive industry. American car manufacturing companies, with the great Detroit and Ford’s assembly line, have been one of the landmarks of USA industrial power. These enterprises had decades of experience, America won the war but despite this in the 80s Japanese took over the automotive industry. Toyota production system became famous and the whole world looked at Japanese organizational techniques to find inspiration.
One of the elements of Japanese culture in this field is 5S. Long story short, it’s the organization of a workplace where:
Implementing these principles helps to create a safe and effective workplace. It improves the efficiency of a whole company without putting a strain on workers.
Alcoa is one of the biggest aluminum producers in the world. Charles Duhigg in his famous book, the Power of Habit, described an interesting story about the company. Once upon a time, the new CEO has been nominated. His name was Paul O’Neill. He shocked stakeholders on his inauguration speech because instead of describing his plan to increase effectiveness, profit, and reduce cost, he gave a talk about increasing workplace safety.
O’Neill managed Alcoa from 1987 to 1999. During that time period, the market capitalization skyrocketed from 3 to 27 billion USD, while net income went up from 200 million to almost 1.5 billion USD.
Was it money saved on industrial accidents?
Obviously not. The money was wasted because of bad organization. Workplaces have been badly organized, they posed risk for workers, reporting the problems was far from perfect and the whole organization suffered. O’Neill has introduced the pressure for improvement of the production process. Workplace safety was metrics of perfection. As we can see from the results – it was a proper one.
Software development and IT industries obsessed with optimization. New frameworks which allows us to work faster. New processors, more RAM, more storage. Faster algorithms. CPUs generating more FPS. We continuously believe that we can make anything better, quicker, cheaper and more efficient.
A software engineer, when confronted with the job, tries to optimize it. If the tasks are repeatable, a developer will try to automate it. If something takes too long, the engineer will figure out how to do it quicker, using a different approach.
What then can be more annoying and demotivating for a developer than the situation where something slows him down and he can’t get rid of it!
The amount of these obstacles is surprisingly substantial in most corporate workplaces. Let me give you a few examples:
I remember one manager in a big company wondering how it’s possible that startups are more efficient while they have smaller budgets so theoretically they should have worse engineers. My experience tells me the reason is the corporate inertia, when all the procedures mentioned above slow down everything sometimes to gargantuan extent.
Except for technical aspects, we need to remember also about the ergonomics of the developer’s workplace. Many companies buy the same chairs, keyboards, desks, monitors, and other gear for all employees. It’s understandable and usually, these things are of good quality. However, there always be some amount of people – some unusually short, others obese, tall or sensitive – who will suffer from these default solutions. They will have headaches, sore eyes, the pain of their wrists. You can be sure they will have a problem doing the most important thing in the work of the developer – to focus.
The software engineer, who doesn’t focus, burns company money. Getting the flow is not as easy as going to the office every day. Talkative colleagues, lots of meetings interrupting our focus during the day, uncomfortable chair – all of this can ruin our flow.
User experience became big thing. Every company knows now how important UX is and almost all enterprises producing software have UX experts in their teams.
Analogically we should adopt the idea of developer experience, DX. The lower developer experience in the company and project, the more money will be burned, the staff turnover will be greater and the team’s output will be minuscule. On the other hand – awesome developer experience will bring us great experts at a lower price, will give us a productivity boost and we will not need to constantly recruit new team members because old ones decided to quit.
Last but not least, let’s remember – Microsoft always cared about developers 🙂
If you want to update your git feature branch with the new changes from the master branch, you need to:
TL;DR: merging creates additional commit, rebasing rewrites history. Usually the team chooses the way to handle conflicts in repository so ask your colleagues first what your team approach is.
git checkout master git pull git checkout target_feature_branch git merge master
git pull --rebase origin target_feature_branch fix conflict and then → git add . git rebase --continue git push -f
console.log(foo); //returns undefined not ReferenceError exception var foo;
Console.log will not throw the exception. It will print undefined.
In most of the programming languages, we should have some ‘variable undeclared’ exception. In JavaScript, when the code is executed, the declarations of the variables (declared using var keyword, but not let!) and functions are hoisted, moved to the top (of the scope).
Important thing to notice is that initializations are not hoisted.
console.log(foo); //returns undefined var foo = “bar”;
Well, if we need it or not is a good question, but let’s take a look at the example of how hoisting can be useful. As I said before – declarations of functions are also moved up. Therefore we can use the function before it’s declared:
sayHello("Mark");
function sayHello(name) {
console.log("Hello " + name);
}
To read more about the hoisting see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Hoisting