How it all started Today I’m going to talk about how I got into software development. I will be covering my previous career, my move to Chicago, and the interview process that led to my first job in the software industry. Life as a Patent Classifier After graduating from college with a degree in Electrical Engineering, I began working for a company contracted with the US Patent Office. My job was to read patents and place tags on them which would help categorize/classify them.

TDD in React Test driven development (TDD) is a tool for breaking down complex problems into more manageable chunks. This post will explore my journey of applying a TDD approach to website development using React, Jest, and the React Testing Library. In this experiment, I didn’t look at the browser for feedback at all. Instead I got all of my feedback from the automated tests. By focusing on the behavior of the components I’m building, I am able to get a working UI quickly and I’m able to change it’s behavior while still verifying its accuracy.

XP and Scrum Differences This is a continuation on where we left off in the previous post: Agile Methodologies: Comparing XP and Scrum. Last time we discussed the origins of Agile and began to explore some of the differences between XP and Scrum (i.e. sprint cycles and engineering practices). Let’s get back into it! Code Reviews A code review is a process of letting a person other than the original code developer inspect the new code changes.

Transitioning from XP to Scrum Today I will discuss two Agile frameworks: Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum. After working in an XP environment for several years, I’ve recently started on my first Scrum team. A lot of the content in this post is based on my own experiences with these two frameworks. Please note that these methodologies can vary slightly from place to place. Wait, what’s Agile again? The idea of Agile started with the Agile Manifesto.

Career Reflection I started my first software developer job two years ago. I’ve learned so much along the way and still have tons more to learn. In a career like this, the learning never stops as this is a continually evolving industry. I love new challenges and learning new things. In conversations with fellow developers they have been impressed in my ability to learn quickly and retain information. I’ve had several people ask me how I learn new technologies and keep my passion for software engineering so strong.

Why write unit tests? As developers, we want to write code that works and has as few bugs as possible. For example, when we write some production code we expect that given an input of abc the application will respond with 123. Writing and running automated tests can give developers a high level of confidence that their code does what it’s supposed to do. Unit tests isolate the system under test and throw a variety of scenarios in the system’s direction.