Rachel M. Carmena

Some topics in a nutshell

Published: 7 June 2021

This profession allows me to meet a lot of good people. One of them is the reason for this post.

Carlos Blé talked to me about his podcasts and the opportunity of participating with one-minute audios. That’s a good idea for me to think about the content previously and, at the same time, to make the effort to find the key points.

Here is the transcript of my audios.

Writing a blog

It wasn’t clear to me that having a blog was worthwhile because of thinking that posts could be obsolete very soon.

Not only technical posts could be out of date but also subjective posts because we evolve and can change our mind.

However, a blog helped me to organize ideas, to spend time reflecting on some topics and to spread things that had been useful when I shared them personally.

At last but not least, I also learn more from the received feedback.

Gender gap

If I think about myself and the reason why I’m working in tech, the answer is my mother, that is to say, having a female reference.

On the other hand, I’ve had bad experiences in this profession.

So, I think it could be useful to address these things:

Making women who were in this profession visible.
Taking care of women who are in this profession.

Test-driven development

I think that learning and practicing TDD can provide us more benefits beyond the TDD cycle.

It teaches us:

To think before writing code.
To divide the problems thanks to the step by step.
The importance of continuous improvement with the step of refactoring.
- That’s also a humbling experience because it’s really difficult to do something right at the first time.
- And it also helps us to progress more quickly because of the focus on making it work as the first step.
The value of tests because they are in the first place.

Therefore, regardless of working in a context where TDD can be difficult, I think that knowing TDD has much to offer.

Further reading: Be open-minded, my friend: TDD.

Code comments

I find empathy useful. That is, thinking about someone that didn’t live my circumstances or moments of taking some decisions. What comments would be useful for others?

Further reading: Be open-minded, my friend: Documentation.