Kartech Blog

I was recently put on a project to upgrade an application that was written by one of the other developers a number of years ago. As I started going through his code, it reminded me how important code reviews are for a development team. This particular developer is no longer with the company, and when he did work in our group, we didn't have solid procedures and standards for code development. We tried to do code reviews with this particular developer, but he was really obstinate, and only wanted to show demos of the application. Any time we asked to see code he would show us as little as possible. He also never checked code into the code repository, so when he finally left the company, I had to get access to his dev environment and check-in all his projects.  Over the years I have seen this type of behavior often, and I still see it a little today. Fortunately, with solutions like GIT and TFS, there is a lot more collaboration built into the development environments. Back...

I have been lucky to be able to work from home during the coronavirus quarantine, and for the most part, I have been able to keep up with my workload and stay productive. The only problem that I really ran into was staying focused on tasks. My position has changed a bit lately and I am doing more work on the infrastructure side of the business, but I am still doing development work as well. Often I feel like I am just bouncing between projects and not spending enough time on any one thing to get something accomplished.  I started looking at strategies to improve my productivity and I ran across the Pomodoro technique. I had looked at it before, but I never tried implementing it. The basic idea of this technique is to work in 25-minute blocks of time that are referred to as Pomodoro's. After each Pomodoro, you take a five-minute break, and after four Pomodoro's, you take a twenty-minute break. The technique is actually named after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. To use the ...