DaedTech Digest: Code Quality, Feature Flags, and Physical Migration

Happy Friday, everybody.  It’s DaedTech Digest time today.

I am just wrapping up my work week and preparing to spend all day tomorrow (today, by the time you read this) driving south to the US Gulf Coast for the next 5 weeks.  Why?  Because it’s cold where I am in Michigan, and it’s not cold down there.

We’re planning a winter/early spring where we split time between a town called Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, San Diego, and Mesa Arizona.  So if you live in any of those places and have suggestions for places to go or meetups to attend, I’m all ears!

Picks

• If you like posts along the lines of the one I made Wednesday, then I suggest a couple of podcasts.  First, the Freelancer’s show, and second, the podcast of one of the panelists, Jonathan Stark, called Ditching Hourly.  They talk a lot about positioning, marketing, getting business, and getting away from the trap of hourly billing.
• If you have any interest in SEO and keyword research, I recommend a Chrome plugin called Keyword Keg.  I use this constantly for my content business to help look for good blog topics.  When you do Google searches, it shows you the keyword volume right inline.
• Speaking of my content business, I’ll do a plug for the Hit Subscribe blog.  The blog is aimed at teaching techies to use blogging to advance their business interests.  So if you want to learn about blogging, give it a look.
• On the coding side, I’ve been enjoying Shouldly a lot for its unit testing assertion semantics.

DaedTech Post Digest

• In a post I wrote for SubMain, I ask the question of whether you’re trying to aggressively automated code review.  I’ve noticed that we, as developers, can easily look at what others are doing and detect a need (or potential) for automation.  But we often have a blindness for our own work.
• Here’s a post I did for NDepend that walks you through the evolution of static code analysis.  Starting with basic linting and getting more and more sophisticated, this technique has come a long way.
• For the ASPE training blog, I mused on the subject of code quality at kind of a philosophical level.
• For one of our newer blogging clients, Rollout, a feature flag management system, I wrote about… wait for it… feature flags.  Well, actually, I wrote about how feature flag management systems let you build apps more quickly.
• And, to round it out, I had a little fun writing about code review myths for SubMain.

Have a good weekend!