Author: Cory Foy

Thanks to the awesome organizers at GOTO Conf Berlin! I had a great time with some great speakers and attendees. Here are my slides for my talk on Learning to Listen to Your Code. I also talked about a couple of books: Alexander’s A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction and The Timeless Way of Building….

Tampabay.com has begun offering a digital subscription for some users of the site. Readers will be allowed to access 15 pages a month for free, but will be asked to subscribe if they use more. While the homepage, several areas within the site and a select number of stories will remain free, others will be…

This week I was being interviewed for some of my upcoming talks, when the interviewer asked about limiting our use of design patterns in code, linking specificially to this post by Jim Bird, where part of his post says: Don’t use patterns unless you need to My response is simple: You can’t not use patterns….

In my office I have a picture of Step 1 of a Lego build. I don’t actually remember what it was to, but it fascinated me in its simplicity. Because no matter how hard of a Lego model you are going to build, you have to start with a single piece, and connect another piece…

This morning I watched a great video by Bret Victor about the future of programming, told from the perspective of a computer scientist in 1973. One thing that really stuck with me was this line: The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you are doing…

As a developer, it is really important to practice your craft. And a great way of doing that is through Code Retreats. The goal of a code retreat is to spend a full day practicing techniques you may not otherwise encounter. One of my favorite constraints to give to participants is as follows: Code Conway’s…

Facebook Shadow Profiles Recently I came across a set of articles talking about Facebook “Shadow Profiles”. If you haven’t read the articles, in a nutshell, Facebook links tremendous amounts of data about your account that you haven’t entered – but that your friends have. For example, if you had an email address you used for…

One of the more prevalent methodologies as part of the agile movement is Scrum. But, like people who use the term Agile, Scrum has come to mean different things to different people. I’ve spent the past 9 years working with teams to adopt various agile methodologies, including Scrum, and wanted to spend some time offering…

A couple of weeks ago I got the chance to speak about Apprenticeships and Software Craftsmanship at Ignite Tampa Bay – specifically how we grow the talent pool locally when so many businesses are complaining about a lack of talent. The talk has now been published! Thanks to the entire Ignite Tampa Bay crew for…