Setting Goals for Onboarding Outsourced Devs

Want to get the most from your outsourced developer? Focus on getting them completely onboarded in a systematic way to make it easy for them to contribute quality code.

When any developer’s onboarding is unstructured, they end up slowing down development velocity and the whole team. It might be by unnecessary questions. Or getting constantly blocked. Or writing low-quality code that’s unreadable.

These are frequent issues with outsourced deves who are not part of your team. New dev team members working remotely struggle more with onboarding and communication than those in office.

By Brennan Angel

Why You Need To Focus on Improving Your API Docs

Whether they realize it or not, these days every company is a technology company. Companies that embrace this can offer developers opportunities to connect and interact with their services through public APIs. For teams building developer tools, accessible and easy to use APIs should be a core part of their business.

Successful developer-focused companies make it easy to build on their services, and engage directly with developer communities to continuously improve and innovate. A key first step is to build out robust developer documentation. Sites packed with helpful content like quick start guides, code examples, tutorials, and coding playgrounds. For those companies with the best developer experience, these will be part of a larger developer portal.

By Brennan Angel

How to Create a Programming Style Guide

A programming style guide is an opinionated guide of programming conventions, style, and best practices for a team or project.

Some teams call it their coding guidelines, coding standards, or coding conventions. While these each have their own meaning in programming, they generally refer to the same thing.

By Brennan Angel

Programming Style Guides, the Blueprint of Clean Code

Programming style debates are too often focused on unimportant formatting choices at the cost of vital style, naming, and coding conventions. Developers will argue more about tabs vs. spaces for indenting than when methods should be split up. Anyone who’s ever received a code review with feedback focused on whitespace and formatting knows how it obscures valuable feedback.

By Brennan Angel

Read Me First: An Intro to Internal READMEs

The most successful open source projects have informative and entertaining READMEs. There are badges, screenshots, animated walkthroughs, and getting started guides. Some even break it into separate documentation sites that match the sections in a README.

By Brennan Angel