Hey friends! Some time ago, I wrote a blog post on the golden path to programming. In case you’re in doubt whether or not you have the talent to become a software developer, go and read that one.Today I want to focus on a special perspective to that topic: Given you are already a professional […]
Author Archives: Thiemo Belmega
On Laravel
Hi, friends! Finally I was able to find the time to work through a full tutorial on the PHP framework Laravel. And I have to say: What I saw there is pretty cool. First of all, there is a build tool for PHP called Composer, which takes care of dependency management, comparable to Gradle in […]
On universities in software engineering – 10 years behind, getting worse
Hi friends! In a recent talk Robert C. “Uncle Bob” Martin mentioned as a side note, that in the field of software engineering college education is limping 10 years behind the industry. Having studied at three different German and one Irish university, this observation matches exactly my experience. To be clear, I acknowledge that there […]
On the sweet spot of testing
Hey, friends! In his great talk “TDD – Where did it all go wrong“, Ian Cooper points out how our common way of unit testing fails the promise that the tests would enable us to refactor the system, by giving us confidence that we didn’t break anything.That common way of unit testing I’m talking about […]
Three tips on writing great unit tests
Hey, friends! I assume you already know technically how to write unit tests, and you are also applying the given-when-then pattern (a.k.a. arrange-act-assert) to make meaningful and understandable test cases. As a professional developer, you will often extend existing behavior of the software and you copy and modify existing tests. But when you have to […]
On the three stages to become a software developer
Hey, friends! In the last years, from time to time you could watch discussions on the question “should everybody learn programming” or “can everybody learn programming”. There are valid arguments on both sides, but I think the main problem on this issue is the lack of a definition what ‘programming’ means in that context. Or […]
On “machine learning for dummies” (I)
Hi friends! I told you on my last reading list article that I happened to bring “Thoughful machine learning with Python” from the library, just for fun, a look outside the bubble… When I started to read that book, I realized that this was not an introduction to machine learning, but something like the “Clean […]
On self-filtering spam emails
Hi friends! Since last week, I’m noticing a few more spam emails than usual in my inboxes… around three every day. The outstanding feature on this emails is that they use custom fonts in the subject line, so it’s easier and quicker for me to recognize them as spam and delete them without even reading […]
On “PHP for absolute beginners”
Hi friends! I finished the third book from my PHP reading list now, “PHP for absolute beginners”, by T.B. Hansen and J. Lengsdorf. And this one is my favorite of the three! This book just like the “Head First” book does everything right in terms of starting practical, giving you a real world example you […]
On the worst property name ever
I wrote another article on medium, explaining what worst possible name you could give to an OO entity or database column. I dedicate this text to my beloved product manager 😉