Get the Rush of Running Great Presentations — Introduction Don’t get nervous at the thought of delivering a presentation, particularly these days when talks are increasingly delivered over webinars and within the comforts of our home. There’s no magic 🔮 involved — all you need is a single document to read from and the ability to sound confident, using…

Put Them On The Right Path — Introduction First of all, a caveat — I’ve never been a line manager to a software engineer but have coached developers in previous roles in an informal way. I put together this article to identify five common problems that might be causing a developer to struggle in his/her performance, along with…

Raise PRs That Everyone Will Thank You For — Introduction You might think that NASA astronauts spend most of their time trying to break records for the longest spacewalk. Of course, you’d be wrong. The vacuum of space is fraught with dangers, so astronauts spend most of their time going through checklists — lots and lots of them. Checklists are…

Introduction Before we cover Planning Poker and the PlanITPoker application, let’s first recap how a sprint planning meeting works in a typical development team. In an Agile project, a sprint planning meeting is held to discuss backlog items that have been prioritized by the business. …

Some Recommendations to Make Sprint Retrospectives More Effective and Less Tedious — Introduction Let’s be honest — many developers hate the retrospective at the end of a sprint. Often, team members feel it’s a waste of time: a 30-minute discussion in which nothing changes and is simply a meeting that just has to be done to check a box in an agile process. …

Revise Java’s Exception Handling Mechanism Quickly — Introduction This article can help you if you’re already familiar with Java exception handling and you need to: Prepare for interviews, or Reacquaint yourself with the language after a period away from Java exception handling e.g. moving from frontend to a backend project. Each part consists of a “drill” that explores…

A Tour of Must-Know Java Data Structures and Operations — Introduction This article can help you if you’re already familiar with Java and you need to: Prepare for interviews, or Reacquaint yourself with the language after a period away from Java e.g. moving from frontend to a backend project. Each part consists of a “drill” that explores important operations of a…

Create Long-Lasting Paintings With These Simple Steps — Introduction After working with canvases for some time, I’ve decided to focus on creating smaller abstract paintings on 6-inch square cradled wood blocks. Wood can be a wonderful surface to work on — it never ‘talks back’; unlike canvas, which gives way slightly as it stretches when applying paint. …

Get Up and Running with the Essentials — Introduction I put together this quick, introductory tutorial workflow to help you to familiarize yourself with the Docker CLI. It doesn’t cover everything. There are several out-of-scope topics which will be covered in a follow-up Part II tutorial. Terminology Throughout this article you’ll hear about Docker Docker Hub images containers Docker Hub…