Clean Code

You're Not Qualified to Have an Opinion on TDD

Nov 07, 2023 by Lane Wagner

One of the marks of a good senior developer is that they have lots of interesting opinions.

I Mock Your Mocks

Jul 13, 2023 by Lane Wagner

Several years ago I started my first job as a “senior” Go developer. You see, after a modest 3 years in the industry, my arcane ability to use the Go standard library’s strings.

Programming types and (incorrect) mindsets

May 08, 2023 by Lane Wagner

DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, Hey, Basecamp, and a few other things, recently wrote an article titled “Programming types and mindsets”, and I just have to chime in on this one.

Your Architecture is Bad, So Make It Easy to Change

Feb 10, 2023 by Lane Wagner

Have you ever started a new software development job and thought: “Wow, what a beautifully architected system!

Snake Case or Camel Case? A Guide to Programming Naming Conventions

Dec 09, 2022 by Lane Wagner

The following names are all valid variable names in nearly every programming language: dogName dog_name DOG_NAME dog-name But which one should you use in your projects?

Your Code isn't Correct

Nov 29, 2021 by Lane Wagner

There is a common trap that we fall into as developers, and it is believing that because some code “worked” that the code was written “correctly”.

Death, Taxes, and Database Migrations

Aug 17, 2021 by Lane Wagner

🔗 In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and migrations.

What are UUIDs, and are they better than regular IDs?

Jul 23, 2021 by Lane Wagner

In the context of back-end web development, an ID is just a unique identifier for a record of data.

Beautiful Language and Beautiful Code

Jun 30, 2021 by

“Dead Poet’s Society” is a classic film, and has become a recent favorite of mine. There’s a scene in particular that I enjoy, where Robin William’s character explains that it’s bad practice to use terms like “very tired” or “very sad”, instead we should use descriptive words like “exhausted” or “morose”!

Check for Standards Before Creating a New One

Jun 07, 2021 by Lane Wagner

I recently had a ticket opened on my team’s backlog board requesting the ability to bypass our API’s caching system.

Backend Developers are UX Designers Too

Apr 12, 2021 by Lane Wagner

Too often I neglect the idea of UX design in backend work. The goal of user experience design is to give users a product that’s easy to use.

Naming Variables the Right Way

Apr 01, 2021 by Lane Wagner

I’ve noticed that bugs introduced into an existing code base are often due to poor variable naming more than one might suspect.

Top 8 Benefits of Functional Programming

Feb 25, 2021 by Lane Wagner

Functional programming is a way to write code where programs are created strictly through functions. Functional programming has gained quite a bit of traction in recent years among the development community, mostly because of the benefits it provides.

What Is Dry Code, and Is It Always A Good Thing?

Jan 25, 2021 by Lane Wagner

“Don’t repeat yourself”, or “DRY” for short, is a somewhat controversial principle of software development. It aims to make code cleaner, which is to say less buggy and easier to work with.

Best Practices for Commenting Code

Oct 29, 2020 by Lane Wagner

I often hear that we need more and better comments in the code we write. In my experience, we frequently need better comments, we rarely need more, and we sometimes need less.

The Nuances of Constants in Go; Go Isn't JavaScript

Oct 22, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Constants can be confusing and easy to misuse in Go if you are coming from an untyped language.

Practical Patterns for Technical Writing

Sep 22, 2020 by Ben Barten

Writing technical documents like API or architectural documentation which exceeds a simple flow diagram can be a daunting task.

How to Make Pure Functions in Golang

Sep 07, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Pure functions are often hyped up in the JavaScript world, probably because of the abundance of stateful front end applications.

Guard Clauses - How to Clean up Conditionals

Sep 06, 2020 by Lane Wagner

One of the first concepts new developers learn is the if/else statement. If/else statements are the most common way to execute conditional logic.

Should You Return Empty or Nil Slices in Go?

Sep 03, 2020 by Lane Wagner

In Go, we often need to return zero values. Idiomatic Go encourages the use of guard clauses, and guard clauses necessitate the need to return early.

Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast - 25% of Our Time Refactoring

Sep 01, 2020 by Lane Wagner

My team has been spending less of our “free” time working on bugs and features from the backlog, and more time refactoring our code and tests.

Make Maps and Slices in Golang - A Guide to Initialization

Jun 29, 2020 by Lane Wagner

There are quite a few ways to create new maps and slices in Go, for example, they can both be initialized using the make() function, the new() function, as literals, or by using the var keyword.

How to Get Consistent Line Breaks in VS Code (LF vs CRLF)

Jun 18, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Have you ever had the problem where you submit a pull request and the diff is much larger than it should be?

How to Sort a Slice in Go

May 27, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Sorting is a common task in programming, and for that reason, most languages have a default sorting algorithm in their standard library.

Don't Go To Casting Hell - Use Default Native Types in Go

May 21, 2020 by Lane Wagner

Go is strongly typed, and with that, we get many options for simple variable types like integers and floats.