Welcome, I'm Marty Haught

I am a software architect/engineer working primarily with Ruby and Ruby on Rails in Longmont, Colorado. I provide software consulting through my company, Haught Codeworks.

Product Development, UX and QA in Small Teams

Posted by Marty Haught on Wednesday, March 04, 2015

In the early years of my software career, I worked in larger organizations where we had different groups of developers along with non-technical teams working collectively inside formal processes. Imagine some form of waterfall process where you had an architect group backed by business analysts, multiple teams of software engineers, and a quality assurance team all watched over by a group of project managers. It was slow and inefficient at delivering the software that business needed. During the late 90s and early 2000s, it was all I knew.

Fast forward a decade later and now I exclusively work in small, cross-functional teams that are fully self-contained. We ship software lightning fast, can react to change requirements overnight and are incredibly efficient.

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Project READMEs

Posted by Marty Haught on Thursday, October 31, 2013

A practice that I have my projects follow is a self-guided README file. The concept is simple. The README should guide you through everything you’d need to do to get this app up and running on your local environment. It seems like an obvious must have on projects yet I’ve encountered several that don’t do this.

As I value efficient use of time, I find having everything I need to get an app up and running in easy steps is huge. As a consultant I end up running easily a dozen apps each year. This README saves me time and makes sure I didn’t forget any important steps. There’s nothing as frustrating as doing the normal rails setup steps only to find an app failing due to some unusual dependency or missing data. Having the README avoids this issue. It’s especially helpful if I haven’t run an app in a long time and just want to make sure I don’t need to redo any of the steps.

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