Welcome to the Weekly Code Maven

Hi,

this is the first edition of the Weekly Code Maven and I am expected - I guess at least by myself - to make some grand statements and share the plans of this newsletter. However, I am really not good at that. I know that whatever I write, the minute I send it out I’ll remember that I forgot to include something important.

In a way it is like a software release. You freak over it as you know once you release it, you cannot take it back. You cannot fix it. You know, at least by anecdotes, but some of you might have experienced, that it is possible to be calm when you release a new version. It is possible not to be afraid of software releases. It is possible to avoid most of the errors that might go in a new release. It is possible to quickly correct mistakes that might have been included in the release. Well, at least in some types of software. Not so much with a newsletter I send out.

At one end of the spectrum there are software companies that release a new version every few years.

At the other end of the spectrum there is Amazon that has several releases in their software stack every second.

In a weekly newsletter it is limited by its nature to a new release once a week and even then I cannot correct what I wrote and already sent out in the previous week.

So I won’t try to make grand promises. Only that the content will evolve.

What will be in the newsletter?

I can tell you in general terms the subjects I am going to cover:

• I will cover Version Control and Automation as these are topics everyone needs to be familiar with.
• I will include Testing and Test automation.
• I will include CI/CD (that is Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery).
• Aspects of Agile and Extreme programming will be covered.
• We’ll discuss Open Source software development a lot.

Who is this newsletter for?

I am going to write about subjects that I hope will help you become a better and more successful developer even if you are not a programmer. I don’t really know what word to use to describe who might be interested in this. hi-tech person is way to cringe.

So it might be better to list a few job titles that might fit.

• Programmer or software developer or software engineer. The title does not really matter.
• In some places people have more specific titles such as front-end developer or back-end developer or full-stack developer. None of these are well defined, but we still use the terms.
• DevOps engineers. I’ll have a lot to say on how the industry has changed the meaning of the word DevOps from being a way of working to be a new job title. But not now.
• QA engineer - The people who are tasked to try to find the bugs of the programmers manually. Some of them are thinking on “moving on” as many organizations undervalues them.
• Automation engineer - The people who were tasked to try to find the bugs of the programmers programmatically.
• Researchers - this is an interesting title. At some of my recent clients I worked with many biologists, chemists, and other scientists who also write software. They don’t see themselves as programmers, even though they do a lot of programming.
• … probably I missed a few more titles.

What happened in the last week?

I started to organize the first session of the Open Source Development Course. It will start next week and as one of the requirements is that participants need to blog through the course I expect that there will be a few interesting posts. I am really looking forward to it.

A few weeks ago I was invited to give a presentation about the Kantoniko web site in Ladino. (Judeo-Spanish). It is a multi-lingual dictionary and a site to help the people who speak the language or who would like to learn the language. Two days ago I had the first practice-run with a few speakers of the language. I did not make a lot of preparations and thus I found out that I need to search for examples I would like to show. I also found a lot of features I wanted to add. This is a good opportunity to add them so I opened issues in the GitHub repository and marked them urgent.

I kept posting on DEV though because of a lot of other commitments my posts were not that original and thus have not received a lot of visitors.

Subscribe

At this point I’d like to invite you to subscribe to the newsletter so you will not miss the next issue.

Gabor Szabo