Articles by Dayton Nolan

Dayton Nolan served as a Principal Consultant at DevMynd from 2012 to 2016.

We Will Not Ship Shit

Here at DevMynd, test driven development, continuous integration, static analysis, and weekly code reviews are all part of how we keep our code quality high. However, getting an A+ on Code Climate or passing the build on Codeship does not guarantee that you've haven't pushed out a fresh steaming pile. These practices help deliver quality code, they do not ensure a quality product. Code quality is a means to an end. Quality products are trickier to pull off. Here are a some of the ways we ensure quality product delivery at DevMynd:

February 26, 2014

Sharpening The Saw – Bashing Your Workflow

Typing. As a developer you do a ton of it day in and day out. However, most typing is in service of menial tasks that you repeat several times throughout the day. You should be focused on solving problems, not remembering the API to various command line applications or boilerplate language idioms. Wouldn't it be great if you could automate those tasks? The good news is that nearly 100% of the typing you do is on a computer, which by some kind of miracle is able to be um… programmed. In this post, I'll share some of my favorite ways to stop doing grunt work and focus on solving client problems.

January 30, 2014

The Best Emacs Icon on the Internet

The entire spectrum of text editors is represented here at DevMynd. Among them is Emacs. Emacs is a great editor, but one thing I couldn't stand is its hideous icon. I searched far and wide and couldn't find one to my liking so I created my own. It's clearly, hands-down the best Emacs icon you're likely to find on the entire internet.

July 14, 2013

JavaScript with Nothing to Hide

Since the current trend of "fat-client" web applications, JavaScript has forced it's way into the toolbox of many developers. If you're like most people, you cobble together scripts you need based on examples you find on the internet. After all, it looks a lot like that language you've used day in and day out for the last 15 years so how hard could it be? Unfortunately, most of the examples on the internet aren't very exemplary. It's time we had a candid chat about anonymous functions.

July 1, 2013