Grant Winney

I write when I've got something to share - a personal project, a solution to a difficult problem, or just an idea. We learn by doing and sharing. We've all got something to contribute.

Articles of Grant Winney

levelup teamwork

Feb 3, 2021

Be ready to explain your code

Does the mere thought of explaining your code cause anxiety? Be confident! We should all understand what we're writing and why. It's an opportunity (for everyone) to learn!...

reflection attitude

Jan 25, 2021

Stubborn to a fault

Have you ever gotten into a project, underestimated the difficulty, and found things going sideways? You calmly set it aside and walked away, right? Riiiiighttt......

dev question mocking unit testing

Dec 9, 2020

What is mocking a dependency?

When you're writing tests, you generally don't want to write to the database, email customers, and hit third-party API's. That's why we need to know how to mock dependencies!...

dev question

Nov 27, 2020

Does the idea of submitting to a code review make you sweat bullets? Or do you brush it off as a necessary evil? It should be a (hopefully positive) conversation, wherein the team agrees to the code they're all going to have to help maintain, and maybe learns something new too....

programming reflection

Oct 10, 2020

The transient nature of code

I just did one of the worst things a dev can do to another dev. I deleted his code! It was good code, covered by dozens of tests... but it wasn't needed anymore. The nature of our work is that it's a progression, and any individual code is transient by nature. Today's code is tomorrow's refactoring....

c#exception handling

Sep 17, 2020

Does rethrowing an exception in C# still reset the stack trace?

All programming languages have gotchas to trip you up. In C#, one of them is the subtle (but significant) difference between "throw" and "throw ex"....

reflection carousel dev question

Sep 14, 2020

How will I know when I'm a programmer?

How do you know when you've finally arrived, and are officially a programmer? Is it a set of skills, a certain amount of time? Can you ever really arrive, when it's a race of one with no finish line?...

retro html5 nodejs zelda

Sep 9, 2020

Run Link Run (saving Zelda for 30+ years)

A few years ago, on the 30th anniversary of the Legend of Zelda, Scott Lininger and Mike Magee open sourced a 3D version of the original LoZ. The site was taken down, but the code's still available to run!...