"I should add a comment to this task for next year to visit their shitty site in Chrome, because it doesn't work in Firefox." I did that last year and failed to notice the note.

The Doctor is In at #devoxxgr. Join me for free consulting or coaching. Simply sit down and let's start!

Is there truly nobody struggling with mock objects out there? I asked Claude Code to generate an example of a Java project using mock objects and it generated my Point of Sale teaching example.

Intéressant! Que font mes amis francophones à l'écrit? C'est une reforme qui j'avais entièrement raté. 😉 www.ledevoir.com/culture/9729...

"Should I pull more tickets?" These two answers are clearly wrong: "Yes" and "No". A helpful answer is significant more complicated. We handle these questions are other thorny problems as part of Office Hours. Not free, but excellent. office-hours.jbrains.ca

"Playing Well With Others: An Example" Choosing not to perpetuate LinkedIn as a cesspool of self-proclaimed thought leaders yelling past each other. blog.jbrains.ca/permalink/pl...

Iterations/sprints are dead. Scrum is dead. Agile is dead. Hold on... maybe. blog.jbrains.ca/permalink/wh...

Few things can wake you up quite like downloading accounting information and then seeing a bunch of it disappear. At least, this time, there was a simple explanation for their bug.

When I started practising #GTD I didn't realize that I would come to know focusing on a task itself as rewarding and even addictive. I notice more and more, when I feel scattered, an abstract longing for doing something I can focus on.

Consider treating your inbox as containing options, not obligations. I know: it's easier said than done. Even so... blog.jbrains.ca/permalink/yo...

I just drafted 1400 words about mock objects (and why you might struggle with them) that have been trying to get out for a long time now. These words might see the light of day, but members of The jbrains Experience are reading them now. ;) experience.jbrains.ca

WAT. blog.thecodewhisperer.com/permalink/a-...

I'm looking for Ottawa/Gatineau folks willing to help me with some office space. I am thinking of scheduling a remote workshop that would run 2 hours on 2 consecutive days, particularly May 12 and 13.

I feel so grateful again today to spend time in frank discussions with caring people who have genuine problems who want to go beyond blaming people for those problems.

The @oredev.org conference is interested in an atproto architecture talk. The CFP is open until the end of March - get your submission in before AtmosphereConf! oredev.org/callforpaper

It's a little thing, but when you can't figure out which window you need, you need to set the window title using a`tmux` configuration setting you barely understand. Everyone starts somewhere. https://jb.rainsberger.ca/permalink/byobu-session-name-in-terminal-window-title

Fixed a detect and accidentally added a feature. #realgitcommitmessages

In college I discovered I was good at chess, which was a surprise to me. My dad was into chess, and taught classes titled Logic; I was always fascinated by the exercises of those courses, but simultaneously, the men of that church community treated any demonstration of my success as a party trick

Unit tests don't merely run more quickly because they execute a smaller part of the system. They eliminate irrelevant details, which makes spotting the mistake less expensive. #softwaretesting #softwaredesign

"I hate planning meetings!" Maybe. Maybe it would help if you saw people actually _planning_: - changing the plan to reflect changing reality - taking our anxiety seriously about missing deadlines - figuring out what to say "No" to, then actually saying it What do you think?

Glow Sticks Are Cheap On Amazon #ExcellentTourName /cc @kathleenmadigan.bsky.social

A programmer's act of love: documenting and reporting an apparent defect in painstaking detail, then removing as many superfluous words as possible.

I highly _highly_ recommend this interview. It's long. Very long. Feature-film length. Even so, I love Dr Hassan's emphasis on what works when trying to help folks out of harmful beliefs, rather than what makes one feel superior over them. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ulv...

Rudimentary TDD in #jq/#jaq: 1. Choose an input; make a text file for it. 2. Figure out the expected output; make a text file for it. 3. `diff expected.txt =(cat input.txt | jaq -L "lib" 'main_filter')` It seems like real work to run multiple tests together, but this is a start.

I'm _trying_ to trust the process, but I haven't yet figured out how to get away from investing myself in the results. substack.com/@jbrains/not...

What if I told you that we could turn deadlines into act of love? Stop looking at me like that. blog.jbrains.ca/permalink/de...

Unfortunate pattern in business: 1. Business struggles with cash. 2. Business makes decisions that alienate regular customers. 3. Regular customers have fewer options, so they stay, but they are ready to go at a moment's notice. 4. Customers stay, so business concludes "nothing wrong".

When I began practising #GTD I thought I needed to get more done in less time. As I learned more from the system, I realized that I was already trying to do too much and I needed to make more space to do less. That's the real wisdom I see in GTD.

Compassion fatigue means I forgive myself for doing this every so often, but only a few minutes, then it's back to work.

I am surprised to learn that some folks struggle with _Getting Things Done_ because of its "emphasis on multitasking". I think the book and the system say the exact opposite. [more to follow]

Have you tried #GTD and failed? or even struggled? Do you "start again" every few months or once a year? Does it never seem to stick? What's going on for you? I'd like to help. Reply or send me a message privately at tell.jbrains.ca.

What are the Cool Kids using these days to prepare slides for a conference talk on Linux? Interesting and offbeat options considered.

Trump convinced gullible Congress people who don’t know how software works to yoink TikTok & hand it to one of his billionaire donors. Now the new TikTok ToS say they will tell the government users’ citizenship & transgender status if it asks. We have less privacy today than we did yesterday.

Yes, and... ...I also consider interesting trades. How many Rainsbergers do you need? (Hint: all.)

The part of the team that worked full-time under The Astro Technology company did join Cloudflare -- and we are all happy for them! But, the overall Astro team is bigger: some of us worked as contractors or voluntarily, and currently depend on the very hard-to-get OSS sponsorships.

There are some great people, @yanthomas.dev included, looking for their next adventure! Oh hey, and me included, too! I'm not in a rush, but keeping my eye out for the right opportunity in docs or community leadership. If you've liked using or contributing to Astro, maybe part of that came from me!

When one part of a function is not changing while you're repeatedly changing another part, this is a signal to consider breaking that function into two pieces: the stable part and the unstable part. This isn't a law, but merely a helpful guideline. #EvolutionaryDesign

"an extraordinarily interesting video that touches on a load of great topics" No, really! Someone just wrote this comment about my conversation with Marco. This gives you an idea what it would be like to work with me. What do you think?

fivepinbowling.substack.com/p/towards-tr... #5pinbowling

There is no boolean so simple that I won't get it wrong at least once in the space of a few hours of programming. Therefore, I work in tiny steps and lean on tests.

Even when it's not an industrial-strength "real-life" project situation, discussions of testing strategy are quickly transformed into discussions of interpersonal conflict and individual emotional turmoil. And that's why you need an adviser like me: help navigating the hard parts. ;)

This emerged during Office Hours Chat! today. (tiny 🧵.) Work describes the tasks we do and why we do them, but Job is only a mechanism to exchange tasks/time/energy for money. Sometimes we have the opportunity to do Work at Job and we often feel happier when we do this.

@kathleenmadigan.bsky.social I propose that you start a Patreon with just one subscriber tier called "Termite". I imagine many folks would be happy to give you $5/month.

Someone contacted me today to ask me about my approach to teamwork for "Agile groups", but left a fake email address, so I don't get to answer them. What a pity. I think I could have enjoyed that conversation.

Would you like results without blame in 2026? Are you tired of being told you're doing it wrong? experience.jbrains.ca

Software design techniques represent, at their core, a guess about what a hypothetical future reader will understand more with a lower investment in effort, time, and money. I consider "guess" the key word of that claim. What makes you guess more accurately? Experience, knowing the audience, ...

Designing software means forever balancing two opposing consequences of the limits of working memory: - wanting conciseness and relying more on tacit knowledge to make writing code feel easier - wanting clarity and relying less on tacit knowledge to make understanding code feel easier No escape.

Something something great minds thinking alike... #refactoring #evolutionarydesign Different articulations of a mental model will click with different people, but those models tend to be much more alike than they are different. :)

I've been focusing a lot recently on refactoring. Simultaneously one of the most valuable and rarest developer skills. In this post, I talk about the different levels of refactoring: * Primitive (the basic "moves") * Tactical * Strategic codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/12/18/r...