This article is part of a series about complexity metrics: Measuring complexity What Metrics to Use? The Impact of the Environment The alarm rings suddenly and intensely, waking you up from the food coma you were getting into. Red lights are on, sign of a major crisis. What an idea to eat a massive burger on a release day! Everybody’s running in every direction, but nobody seems to go anywhere. Developers begin to type frenetically some nonsense in their terminals.

This article is part of a series about Zsh: Becoming a zsh master Configuring Zsh Without Dependencies A Guide to Zsh Expansion with Examples A Guide to the Zsh Completion with Examples A Guide to the Zsh Line Editor with Examples What would we do if we couldn’t use the wonderful TAB key to expand our commands, filenames, or variables in our lovely shell? Not much, I’m afraid. We would still live in dark caves, hunting some dangerous Mammoth with knives made of stones!

This article is part of a series about complexity metrics: Measuring complexity What Metrics to Use? The Impact of the Environment “This part of the codebase doesn’t feel right!” This was Dave, your colleague developer, arguing in another never-ending meeting to rewrite a part of your company’s codebase. His arguments? Technical debt, high entropy, and the fear of the legacy system. Our work, as developers, pushes us to take many decisions, from the architectural design to the code implementation.

Have you ever wonder what was The Beginning of All Things™? In other words: have you ever wonder what Vim is doing when you start it? What files are sourced, why, and in what order? If you don’t really care, I encourage you to reconsider your position. Knowing what Vim is doing at startup lets you speed it up, overwrites some defaults from the plugins you’ve installed, or even creates your own filetypes.

When I first heard about the SOLID principles as a young and innocent developer, many of them seemed confusing to me. The Open-Closed Principle looked easy, however: we should extend the behavior of our classes instead of modifying them. I did extend the behavior of my classes indeed! Mainly by using inheritance in one form or another. The end result? An abstracted mess, where everybody was wondering what was the use cases my code was covering, hidden under a cheer amount of abstractions and indirection.