How Static Code Analysis Taught Me About Change Management
Recently, I helped spearhead our department’s adoption of centralized static code analysis. I worked with one of our mobile engineers to research various tools and create a decision matrix for comparing options. I’ve introduced new tools to my team before, but this was my first time selecting a tool that would be rolled out and used by my entire engineering department. It was also our department’s first time trying centralized static code analysis.
May 21, 2018
Machine learning is like a garage sale
Machine learning is a field of computer science where mathematical systems “learn” from massive data to adjust their internal models using linear algebra and statistics. It is not a new discipline; machine learning has actually been around for decades but only recently did it get the exposure to make it popular.
May 21, 2018
Google IO 2018: Android has a Jetpack
One of the biggest announcements for Android™ developers from Google IO 2018 was the announcement of Android Jetpack. Android Jetpack is a collection of libraries and guidelines for developing Android applications. Most of these libraries we have seen before, including the Architecture Components released last year at Google IO. Some, are the newly refactored Support libraries, which have been renamed AndroidX.
May 11, 2018
Google IO 2018: Android Things 1.0
We’re just starting the week of Google IO 2018 and already there’s a major announcement, before the event’s official start. Android Things has been moved out of beta is now at version 1.0.
May 7, 2018
To PMP or Not to PMP?
I'm often asked for career path advice by up-and-coming professionals in the project management space. Though there are a lot of great topics to discuss around this career path, inevitably, one particular question always arises, "should I get my PMP certification?" Before I write anything else, I’ll preface by saying that my recommendation on getting the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification varies based on several factors.
May 1, 2018
What is Culture?
At our company we are known for having a great culture. You can feel it when you walk in: people are at ease, they obviously enjoy what they do and the people they work with. But what drives a great culture? What continues to sustain it and how do you know it when you get there?
April 25, 2018
DevOps QA: The Many Hats of a Quality Assurance Engineer
Note: This is the second post in a series about the different roles I end up carrying out as a Quality Assurance Engineer. You can check out the first post here, where I talk about wearing my Tester hat!
April 6, 2018
Drupal 8: Consumption of a Third-Party API
For a recent project, we were tasked to consume the client's internal data from a custom API. Now, this scenario was lucky for us, the API provides a total item count of about 5000, but when queried with a start date, it provides all revisions of items between then and now. The premise was that the data was to be downloaded at regular intervals, so that content editors didn't need to copy and past to keep product information up to date.
April 5, 2018
The Many Hats of Quality Assurance Engineers: Tester
Quality Assurance Engineer is a broad term that can cover a wide variety of roles and responsibilities. It can refer to a more specialized role, like Automation Engineer or Technical Support. It might be used to describe someone responsible for DevOps practices, or the person in charge of Scrum Master duties and feature testing.
April 5, 2018
Discovery is Like Onboarding
I recently started working at Metal Toad. Metal Toad has one of the best onboarding processes I have ever experienced — thorough documentation, there are more people happy to help me than I can count, there are well thought-out processes for onboarding, and just about anything that could be done in advance of my arrival had already been done. Nevertheless, I am drinking from a fire hose in an attempt to answer the following (partial) list of questions:
How does the company function?
March 15, 2018