Thoughts on building & selling software

Thoughts on building & selling software

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Your Variable Names Could Be Better

Clean Code Featured

Your Variable Names Could Be Better

Variables are such a fundamental building block of software development, many developers tend to overlook the important role variable names play to ensure a clear & maintainable codebase.

Liquid Skills

As we move through life, we end up acquiring various skills to help us improve our careers. Some we focus on & develop deliberately, while others seem to be acquired almost by accident.

Architecture Overview: Sessionify

Architecture Featured

Architecture Overview: Sessionify

Another quick & dirty architecture breakdown, this time of the Sessionify application I built to manage personalized conference schedules.

Scribe: Architecture Overview

Architecture Featured

Scribe: Architecture Overview

This is a quick & dirty architecture breakdown of Scribe, a transcription application I built that could be used to transcribe any audio file & provide accurate speaker identification.

Burn It Down

As the year comes to a close, I am drawing the curtains on my Ship It experiment. I wrote up a small write up of everything, you can read it here. This article will try to summarize my feelings about the experiment as whole & outline where I am going to go from here.

One Year of Shipping It: A Retrospective

One Year of Shipping It: A Retrospective

In January of this year I started an experiment to ship one new thing every month for one year. As December comes to a close I would like to reflect on the past year to evaluate how the experiment went. Here is a breakdown of what I worked on this year & some quick thoughts about each project.

Design Pattern Primer: The Factory

Design Patterns

Design Pattern Primer: The Factory

When writing object oriented code we end up needing to create a lot of different objects. Sometimes the process to create those objects is complex or maybe we don't know exactly which type we will need to create. Situations like these are where using the Factory pattern comes in handy.

Having a Refactor Plan

Having a Refactor Plan

The Boy Scout Rule [https://deviq.com/boy-scout-rule/] is mostly non-sense. In any moderately complex system the smallest changes can have wide spread & unforeseen effects. Technical debt is a problem & fixing it should be just as important to the business as fixing a bug or adding a new feature. It

Knowing When to Quit

Knowing When to Quit

For the past few months I have had pet project. I know, huge surprise. This was the one I thought, "When this is finished it will be a game changer". I stayed up late writing code, designing the perfect architecture, creating flawless CI/CD pipelines; It was truly a wonder

Ship it: Six Months In

Ship it: Six Months In

I am a little more than six months into a year long challenge to deliver something new each month [https://www.matthensley.io/ship-it/]. Forcing myself to make something new every month is proving to be pretty challenging, but also fun. I went into this experiment with the expectation that

Monetize Your Side Project: Ways To Get Paid

Monetize Your Side Project: Ways To Get Paid

When you start building a side project, it is hard to resist daydreaming of one day gaining millions of users and, as a result, earning millions of dollars. Unfortunately, most developers don't know where to begin when thinking about charging for their app & some are even deterred by the idea

Ship It. Even If It Sucks.

Ship It. Even If It Sucks.

I love starting things. Right now I have 13 unpublished drafts for blog articles on various topics. I am the proud owner of thirty-nine domains. Six of them are in use. Ideas are great. I've got hundreds of them. Working products are better. Starting a new blog, app, or website

Why I Over Explain Things

Why I Over Explain Things

Hi. My name is Matt & I am a constant over explainer.

Code Clarity: Thinking About Code as Questions & Answers

Code Clarity: Thinking About Code as Questions & Answers

Anyone can write code a computer can understand. It takes an expert to write code a human can understand. In this post we are going to look at an example of how to add clarity to our code by thinking about our logic as a set of questions & answers.

Private Methods: What Do You Have To Hide?

Private Methods: What Do You Have To Hide?

We constantly refactoring & improving code bases but, sometimes we can be lukewarm about what we are doing. Enter the private method: Codebase Ruiner.

You (Probably) Don't Need An Interface For That

You (Probably) Don't Need An Interface For That

It's easy to do things in the name of best practices but, how often do we sit down and ask ourselves if that is the right thing to do in our current situation?