John Hamelink

I once read a much better article than this one by Matt Ward that attempts to show the similarity between code and poetry. Matt shows how the flow and syntax of good code, that abstract minimalism and lowest common denominator approach, is actually very similar to that of a poem.

I agree with everything Matt says, but I felt the article was a little lacking in showing how the coder can be a poet in order to achieve greatness and self-fulfillment (that's what poetry and coding are partly about, in my opinion) . To this end, I've compiled some...

A good developer is energy conscious. A good developer understands the impact he has on the environment around him. A good developer is able to take all these things and use them to make a positive impact in his universe. A good developer is a green developer.

A green developer understands how to build in blocks: he must master the art of software engineering versus software developing. What sets the software engineer apart from the developer is not speed, agility or knowledge, it is the ability to recognise and compartmentalise everything he does...

Throughout my career so far, I've mostly worked alone. When I say alone, I've often worked alongside other people, but ultimately I've been paying them, or I had made the choice about whether they were suitable for the project (or for me) or not. They've mostly not been working on the same thing I've been working on either.

Ultimately, I've been the leader of the projects I've worked on during most of my freelance career. While at my current fulltime job however, due to the nature of the work I was doing there, I often had to work with other...

As an avid Linux user for over 5 years, it still surprises me how many people don't know basic things about Linux which make it so appealing to people like me. If you're thinking about using Linux for the first time, or perhaps you've only just heard about it, here are a few things you might now know that might interest you:

Linux is actually the name given the "kernel" of one type of operating system. There are hundreds of thousands of Linux distributions for you to choose from. Linux draws its inheritance back...

NodeJS is awesome. I've used it for many pet projects and have worked on commercial projects which have made good use of Node in sticky situations. When it comes to testing Node, we're spoiled. My favourite testing framework is Mocha and my favourite testing library is should.js. We'll be using that alongside Jenkins to build an automated test suite for our demo repository.

Mocha is our testing framework. We use it to describe the tests we want to make.

Should.js is our assertion library. We use Should to check something is...