Complete Developer Podcast

In this episode, we discuss our journey through podcasting, where it all started, where it lead us, and why we are stepping away from it. Read more

Git is a powerful tool that is essential to the software development process. It was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 as a way to manage the development of the Linux kernel. Today, it is widely used by developers all over the world to manage their own projects and collaborate with others. Git has become the industry standard for version control. With Git, developers can easily keep track of chang...

Most of us have a reasonable working definition of what “agile” means in a software development context. We all know what it is SUPPOSED to mean, what it means when implemented correctly, and we even probably have some expectations when another developer uses the term. But when talking to a non-technical person, especially someone in an upper management role, we often have a hard time articulating...

Almost all development work today is done on teams, both due to the complexity of our work and the sheer volume of it. As time has gone on, development work has also become more intensely collaborative, and “throwing work over the wall” has been acknowledged as being a terrible idea. As a result, the personalities of one’s coworkers has become more and more important. Unfortunately (or fortunately...

ChatGPT is a powerful language model developed by OpenAI that has been trained on a massive amount of text data. It is capable of answering a wide range of questions and generating text in response to prompts. ChatGPT has been used in a variety of applications, including chatbots, language translation, and text completion. For software developers, ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for improving code...

Breaking down your goals into more manageable tasks creates the flexibility to adjust as needed and brings clarity to the goals. When seen from the perspective of a step by step process goals are seen not as daunting behemoths to be gazed on in wonder but as complex things that can be accomplished through diligence and careful planning. This makes the process of achieving a larger goal more achiev...

Depending on your use cases, your application may need to work well on Apple, iPhone, Windows, Apple, Linux, and even various types of tablets. And that’s just if you are looking at the US market – international markets have loads of other options. This is part of the reason web applications are so popular – it’s a way of making cross-platform concerns into someone else’s problem. And frankly, tha...

“The habits we choose to live by can shape our lives and define who we are.” – Stephen Covey As software developers, our habits can greatly impact our success and the quality of our work. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a book written by Stephen Covey that outlines key habits that successful people have in common. Last year we discussed these from a negative sense, talking about 7 habit...

Architecture projects are some of the most fun projects in development. Or at least they often appear that way. There is often the perception that in these projects you can fix all the little things that annoy you in your work environment. You can make it easier to roll out new features, while keeping the system more stable and easier to maintain. While this can be true, there is some risk here. I...

Social engineering is defined as the use of psychological tactics to manipulate individuals into divulging confidential information or performing actions that may compromise their organization’s security. Social engineering attacks often target the weakest link in an organization, which is the employees. They are looking for easy access into a system. It is important to have a firm grasp of social...

The unix philosophy was originated by Ken Thompson and describes a set of cultural norms and approaches to minimalist, modular software development. This philosophy was based on the experience of the leading developers of the unix operating system. In the early days of software, there weren’t as many software tools as there are today – in fact, software tools (that is, tools that software develope...

You don’t have to be a morning person to start your day off right. A good morning routine can make a tiring stressful day survivable and possibly enjoyable, whereas a poor morning routine can destroy even the most enjoyable of days. The less of a morning person you are the more important a routine becomes as it reduces the requisite cognitive functioning early in the morning when you may not be fu...

We had an issue with out CDN, we apologize for the issues with access to the episode HTTPS and SSL. We fixed it on the website but the podcatchers did not update because the RSS didn’t push a new episode. This apology should fix that so that you are able to listen to that episode now. Thank you for listening, Will and BJ The post Apology appeared first on Complete Developer Podcast .

As security concerns have become more and more important on the web, there has been a growing movement to make sure that communication between the client and the server is ALWAYS encrypted. There are many reasons for this. For one, encrypted communications are more difficult to spy upon, and more difficult to tamper with in transit. It also means that people feel safer dealing with sensitive data...

Mike Acton gave a talk at the Game Developer’s Conference back in 2019. In that talk he detailed behaviors that he expects from developers he works with regularly. They are positive statements that he then discusses the problems arising from a lack of each behavior. In a previous episode we reacted to the first half of Mr. Acton’s list. We gave ourselves a time-box to keep from going over and bett...

At work, your boss probably (hopefully) has a pretty good idea of what needs to be accomplished in the next few months. Many business owners have found that productivity frameworks, like the twelve week year, help considerably with productivity. There is a good reason for this – Parkinson’s law specifies that the work will expand to fill the time allotted to it. Systems like the 12 week year help...

In a talk given at the Game Developer’s Conference, Mike Acton discussed what annoys him about most of the developers he’s worked with over the years. He lists them as positive statements and then discusses why a lack of that particular statement annoys him. While they were written for game developers they are generic and apply across the development landscape. This will be a little bit different...

While this year’s theme is time management, there are some things you should get in order before you start trying to structure a productivity system to help with your time management. In particular, you need to actually be able to track tasks that you need to do, whether they are on your most critical projects or not. You need to be able to focus on a single tasks or similar types of tasks effecti...

This is one of the most fun episodes we record each year. Both Will and BJ look forward to reviewing their predictions from the previous year and creating new ones. It’s important to stay up to date with the changes in technology, especially in your particular field. While this year was less unpredictable than some other recent years, it did see a lot of interesting developments both in tech and o...

The theme for 2022 was resilience. Over this past year most of us have gotten at least one lesson on the importance of resilience, whether it was because of a job loss, a major change in a relationship, a death in the family, or because their entire social life was upended. However, the fact is, life changes, and sometimes changes a lot in a very short period of time. Fragility is the natural stat...