Smile, this is fun!
Life is simply too short to spend one's time laboring in a job that isn't enjoyable. I left a rewarding
training as a botanist behind to work in bits and bytes everyday because I love what we do here at DTS.
Addressing your business problem, solving your programming enigma, or modeling your schema challenges with
the latest and greatest technologies get's me out of bed in the morning and is tremendously rewarding.
Being a team of "doers" means buckling down on tough technical issues, finding novel solutions, and avoiding negativity.
It isn't done until it's tested
Having been around the "final signoff" block a time or two, it has become apparent to me that automated unit testing, and
test driven development (TDD) more specifically, is the single greatest tool the developer can use to guarantee that the
team ships quality. Testing (whether unit or functional) should never be an afterthought to be conducted once all the code is
written. It is an integral and iterative part of our day to day operations. Embracing unit testing and/or TDD practices has
a dramatic and simplifying effect on the code base and architecture of an application, keeping things as simple as possible and
ensuring a high quality product that behaves as expected, and handles exception scenarios and corner cases gracefully.
Don't write that code
Sounds odd coming from a developer. A mantra I have frequently been reminded of and have taken to heart is that
the most valuable line of code is the line you never write. It costs nothing to produce, nothing to unit test,
nothing to functional test, and will never result in unintended bugs. Don't write it until you need it and your
software will be vastly simplified at both the code and functional levels.
