Applications Programming

A compendium of knowledge and skills applications programmers (software developers) need

This is a compendium† of the knowledge and skills that applications progammers (software developers) typically need to be effective contributors in software development internships and jobs. This was compiled based on direct observation, and conversations with recent graduates at interships and jobs.

†compendium: a collection of concise but detailed information about a particular subject

Practices

• Acceptance Criteria
• Code Review
• Dev/QA/Test/Prod separation
  • In Spring Boot, these are called profiles
  • In Rails, they are set via the RAILS_ENV environment variable
  • In Python Flask, it’s the FLASK_ENV=development or FLASK_ENV=production variable.
• Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery
  • CI/CD for SpringBoot on TravisCI
• Grooming
• Pairing (including strong-style pairing) and Mobbing
• Retrospectives (retros)
• Stories
• Standup
• Teamwork including Team Alliances

Concepts/Terminology

• Database Migrations
• Minimum Viable Product
• Product Manager (not the same as Project Manger)
• Spike
• Technical Debt
• Thin Slice
• User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX)

Git Skills

• branches and pull requests
• Amending a commit (git commit --amend)
• Proper use of git push -f
• Interactive rebase (git rebase -i)
• Fixup commit (git commit --fixup sha)
• Proper use of git reset --hard sha
• Proper use of git clean
• Proper use of git stash and git stash pop
• Proper use of git pull --rebase origin master
• Proper use of git rebase --onto base target
• A decorated graph: git log --oneline --graph --decorate --all
  • And a config git config --global alias.lol 'log --oneline --graph --decorate --all'

Unix Skills

• Manipulating environment variables
• Using grep to search files