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 essential for mitigating common problems and are used in all kinds of scenarios. For software engineers, a Pull Request (PR) checklist ensures that everybody’s PRs satisfy a standard set of quality assurance rules.

In this article, I discuss my Top 10 checks I do before raising a pull request.

1. Compare Changes

Carefully…

Introduction

Setting up unit test initial conditions can quickly become long, complex, and hard-to-read unless development teams adopt a consistent approach. This article explains why you should consider using builder methods in your unit tests, constructing more understandable business scenarios.

The Problem

Let’s assume we’re writing software for an online sandwich shop, allowing customers to choose their fillings and dressings to build up their ideal sandwich.

Create these enums to represent the kinds of fillings you can have:

    enum TomatoType
    {
        CHERRY,
        ROMA
    }    enum LettuceType
    {
        CRISPHEAD,
        BUTTERHEAD,
        ROMAINE,
        LOOSELEAF
    }    enum BaconType
    {
        REGULAR,
        SMOKED
    }    enum ChickenType
    {
        REGULAR,
        BBQ…

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. The backlog can have just about anything in it, such as bugs reported by application users or new features that are queued to be developed.

The team has a Scrum Master — or moderator — who introduces each user story to the group, providing a high-level summary of the requirements. This is an opportunity for the…

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 your voice as your instrument.

In this article, I share how I prepared a careers webinar that I’ve given to students at colleges and universities. I’ll take you through the delivery and follow-up process, setting up visual aids, and circumventing obstacles.

Part I — Creation

Create your presentation

I use Google Slides for my presentation.

A well-crafted…

This tutorial will show you how to get inspired to produce simple, stylish, and professional compositions for your abstract paintings.

What You’ll Need

• Card (ideally A3 or bigger)
• Cardboard/Stencil
• Pencil
• Ruler
• Scissors / Knife
• Acrylic paints and pencil (and ideally colored pencils or pastels as well)

Instructions

Randomly make marks on a piece of card using a variety of materials. In the following picture, I used acrylic paints, pens, colored pencils, and oil pastels.

Materials I Used

• Cass Art Acrylic paints
• Winsor & Newton 30 cm x 30 cm canvas board
• Small rolling pin/paintbrush
• Newspaper
• Masking tape
• Bubblewrap
• Palette knife (optional)
• Winsor & Newton gloss varnish spray (optional)

Instructions

Create a Border

• Place the canvas board on some newspaper.
• Use a rolling pin to apply a 3–4 cm border of black paint.
• Allow the paint to dry.

Every evening it seems these days, I’m looking forward to getting my work done then learning some more painting. I promise you — I will get back to software blogging sometime after summer 😂.

In this article, I’ll share with you how I painted a rainbow canvas in acrylics with the help of masking tape.

Materials

• Acrylic paints (or spray paints)
• Board (Winsor & Newton 10" x 8")
• Masking tape
• Palette knife
• An old newspaper
• Satin spray varnish (optional — for an excellent finish)

Laying the Foundations

Place the board on paper (ideally an old newspaper if you can find one) and place six…

Contents

• Introduction
• Table
• Column
• Constraint
• Stored Procedure
• View

Introduction

A re-runnable — or idempotent — SQL script means that no matter how many times you run it, you always get the same outcome. This means, for example, that you won’t get an error when you attempt to add the same table or drop a column that no longer exists.

This article will show you how to put checks in place to ensure you’re re-runnable SQL scripts are executed without hiccups.

n.b. Indexes are coming shortly!

Data

You can use the EXISTS operator to find out if a record exists.

IF EXISTS (SELECT 1…