24 October 2020 - My quest for improved craftsmanship

“Good Enough” is often the driving philosophy at the workplace - that’s reasonable. But it also means people who go for “Highest Level of Craft” cannot improve correctly at the workplace.

Hi!

Do you feel agile?
Do you feel proud of the codebase you’re working on?
What’s your idea about how far (or close) you are from the state of the art?
Do you trust the code you read?
What are three positive things your codebase inspires to you?

These are some of the questions I have in my head.

I’m a French engineer with 4 years of experience in web development at the time of writing - mainly back-end, with .NET.

I’ve just spent a bit more than 1 year working on customizing my desktop environment to reach a workflow that I can call efficient. I’m starting to feel comfortable with what I’ve made, so I thought it was a good opportunity to share some things about that experience.

I’ll also post things related to software craftmanship, agile software development and soft skills - I enjoy thinking about these, though I gladly admit that I am far from mastering them. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of topics I am likely to blog about:

• web programming
• resources available for learning
• unit tests
• architecture
• clean code
• code reviewing
• living documentation
• bringing change into your team or organization
• non-violent communication
• dealing with frustration at work
• mindset
• workflow
• command line tooling
• vim (yeah, the text editor)

But first, allow me to dedicate my first post(s) to that one year I spent tweaking my workflow in such a way that I now feel in harmony with my IDE…