I’m a big fan of command line tools, I live by the command line, I do my job by the command line. I hate with a passionate fire, copying and pasting text. When I switched to Jekyll for my blog, I decided I needed a command line tool to generate the blog posts in the correct format so I can get layout, title and the correct file name structure.

Welcome to my new blog running on github pages with Jekyll, Switching from Wordpress to this for the easier content management and no hosting feeds.

My wife is a public school teacher, she teaches students who have special needs. She teaches a lot of students with learning disabilities and one thing she focuses with her students on a concept called “Growth Mindset”.

One of the things that I feel is really missing from the JavaScript programming language is the option of private data and private behavior (methods) to an object. I never could get data that an outside caller couldn’t see. That is until I discovered the JavaScript closure.

Over the last few months, I’ve gotten a TON of feedback from my post in November, “Scrum is the new waterfall”. Some of the feedback was good and others really thought my perspective is extremely negative.

I live and die by the keyboard. The keyboard is my friend and it’s way faster to use an application using a keyboard then it is to use a mouse. In fact there are many studies that show that for non-complex key combinations keyboard shortcuts and aliases are much faster then using the mouse.

As software engineers we communicate far more then most people expect. We constantly communicate wether we write code, talk at standups or respond to emails. Professional communication is essential. Something that I have been working on for myself is improving my professional communication.

I love working with the web, there is so much to know and learn about web development. Have you ever thought about the URL? I recently learned quite a bit about the URL. The URL is composed primarily of a few things:

While I don’t blog the most consistently, certainly the holidays didn’t help. I have recently discovered that I really like writing, getting to express myself in the written form has been liberating. Listening to a guy like the Simple Programmer has inspired me to think of what I could do with my career through my blog. I could start my own training program for new programmers, I could tutor more and I could even speak at a conference. Honing my skills and grammar will allow me to write a book “some day soon”.

A few months ago I decided I wanted to make a little bit of extra money on the side of my main job. I thought it would be nice to have a source of income that I could use to buy things like skis or bikes or other cool gear for my hobbies. I decided to start tutoring, teaching people about software engineering and how to build applications. Man did I meet a LOT of different people, from startup execs to doctors transitioning into the field to people who haven’t used a computer beyond facebook.

In 2015 I read 31 books. I am totally amazed at the number of books that I read because the year before I’m pretty sure I only read about 5 books. Each book is put into a category, and I’ll review the category and call out specific books that I feel are really special.

Clinical studies have shown that walking can have numerous benefits to your health, depression and well being. It can boost your weight loss, ease depression and enhance your life.

I recently bought a pair of the Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7B from Amazon. They’re close to $100 but they’re less then the price of similar Bose headphones.

Scrum while great in theory is in practice a really flawed process of creating software. Scrum is iterative waterfall. Scrum is process hell. Saying this, may get me shunned and kicked out of the Agile club. But I really believe that the bane of our industry is the process management called “Scrum”.

Code is like a living resume. You are constantly changing and learning, or at least I hope you are. If you’re a developer, you may never know when you might be out of a job, so just like it’s a great idea to keep your resume up to date, I highly recommend keeping some sample code around.

My team at UHG has about 13 individual team members. We have 3 full time developers, 3 part time developers, a scrum master, business analyst, product owner, engineering director, project manager and two QA testers.

Encryption really isn’t the sexiest topic, certainly not as interesting or thrilling as something like Ashley Madison, a site that promises you discrete encounters no matter your marital status.

PGP is a encryption tool I use to encrypt and decrypt files containing sensitive data.

Jared Friedman recently wrote a really great article on why he wouldn’t use Rails for any new company. There are a couple of factors that he looks at that makes this a really well written article.

I love RSpec. It’s one of the best tools on the web for opensource developers to write tests. Nothing compares to its power, ability and extensibility. Mocha and Chai for Javascript pale in comparison to its ability to test.

Rebasing is extremely useful, lets say you branched off of release 1.8.3 and need to fix a defect, but it wasn’t completed until 1.8.3 was already on production and 1.8.4 is the new hotness. git rebase release1.8.4 defectBranchName will take defectBranchName and reapply the commits over release1.8.4’s history instead of what it was originally based off of.

I’ve been developing for the web for over 10 years. I started writing for the web when I was 13. At 17 I got enough freelance work to pay for my first year of college (and buying a nice Macbook). It took me 6 and a half years of going to school while working full time to graduate. In all of that time I have learned a lot about the internet and about working with people.

From Linkedin:

At UHG we use Protractor to test our Backbone app for automated E2E dev only regression tests. We do this as apart of an automated CI process to ensure every branch we ingrate doesn’t break existing functionaility. Today, I’m going to walk you through our setup and how you can use Protractor (an Angular tool) to test your non-Angular app. 

I’ve been told I’m one of the most coachable employee’s by one my most recent managers. The reason why is because I’m open to constructive feedback about anything. Think my coding sucks because of xyz? Great, whats the impact to the business and my team? I’ll change it. Does my code suck because you didn’t write it? Get lost, pal.

Who are you? Do you even know? Sure you’re you, and you grew up on that street with those friends. You had that family and you do those things. Everyone can say that, because everyone is that.

My wife and I sell gluten free cookies at local coffee-shops and farmers markets. We love this business, it’s a lot of fun and time to spend together. We recently needed a website as we’re starting to approach local grocery stores and they need to read about our product.

When in life do you grow the most as an individual? Is it through the easy, everything is good time of life? I doubt it; college was tough for me. I went from home schooled from K-12 to the real world of classroom learning, where I obtained knowledge by more then just reading a book.

A couple of weeks I reviewed a pull request from one of our consultants. It contained a set of credentials to authenticate to a health API which could obtain production PHI. That information was stored in source control in plain text.

As a software engineer you have two of the most powerful abilities on earth.

In life there are many things you don’t want to do, such as get the car worked on, mow the lawn or workout. I hate working out, I don’t like the feeling of being sweaty and out of breath.

This summer my wife and I traveled overseas to Asia. Oh Boy, was it a different experience! From the people cutting you off in line to riding in a elevator with 40 Chinese when the elevator is supposed to take only 25. What a crazy experience.

Welcome to my blog. I’m Adam. I’m a Senior Software Engineer for a health insurance company. Me and my team are designing the next generation web applications that will transform the healthcare industry. Currently we’re building a call center application in Javascript.

What is the number 1 way you can stand out as a developer? Sure you can have a really awesome Github with tons of code contributed, but if I’m in HR do I really care or understand that you’ve written significant parts of Ruby core? Probably not. That’s why you need to checkout this really awesome guy, John Sonmez, over at Simple Programmer.