Base CS: Exploring the basics of computer science, every Monday, for a year.

Vaidehi Joshi, embarked on an the admirable journey of writing a weekly post about computer science topics. She is calling the series BaseCS. I’ve found the content to be well written, concise and full of clear explanations and beautiful illustrations. As advertised, some of this content is basic computer science. I’ve enjoyed all the articles published so far.

Five Factor Testing

Sarah Mei lays out five practical reasons to write tests:

  1. Verify the code is working correctly
  2. Prevent future regressions
  3. Document the code’s behavior
  4. Provide design guidance
  5. Support refactoring

Sara correctly points out that our individual approach to testing is a result of the importance that we give to each of these factors. Excellent post.

Writing English as a Second Language

As a Software Engineer I spend a good amount of my time writing emails, commenting on pull requests, Jira tickets, Slack, etc. In this transcript of a talk given to international journalism students, William Zinsser talks about what is good writing and in particular what is good writing in English. As I learned, it’s not necessarily the same as good writing in other languages. Since English is not my first language, I fall often into some of the traps outlined in the talk. Now I know how to fix them!