LornaJane | Lorna Jane Mitchell's Website_News & Media

Main menuSkip to primary contentSkip to secondary contentHomeBlogPublicationsMore LornaJaneAbout LornaJaneWelcome! I'm Lorna: engineer, author and speaker. I'm a Developer Evangelist and I love technology and sharing technology with others. On this site you'll find my blog and links to all the other things I think you (or I) might need to know about me - my opinions are my own and not those of my employer or any other organisation. If you'd like to get in touch, I'd be delighted to hear from you.From The Blog11 Apr2022Outline your writing to ease the creative processFor most of my career I've been a software developer, but now I'm mostly a communicator. As a manager, I give the right level of detail to many different audiences, and I deliver that in words they can understand. As a Developer Advocate, I explain complex technical concepts in useful, memorable, and occasionally entertaining ways. However the best software developers are lazy and I'm still always looking for ways to get things done with less effort on my part! For writing, the best process I know feels like unnecessary overhead, but it's always worth it in the end so today I'm sharing my secrets: create an outline before you start. Continue reading →Posted in work | Leave a reply31 Mar2022 Who are you writing that commit message for?I read a lot of commit messages that make me wonder who the committer had in mind when they wrote it. If you don't read commit messages yourself, I think that can make it even more difficult to think about who the audience is, or when someone would be reading those entries. Perhaps you're writing for nobody, or work in a team that doesn't value the metadata that a single sentence written in the moment can deliver.Next time you write a commit message, try some of these suggestions as your imaginary audience:Yourself, next week, when you finally get back to working on this thing and can't remember where you were up toYourself, when you get a pull request review and can't remember which commit something is in that needs to be removedYourself, debugging how this ended up like this, 6 months from nowYour colleague, eyeballing your work to see how you are getting onPersonally, I think of it as a note to myself. Like an alibi, if someone asks you what's already been done, or what this commit that removes one specific line from a long config file. Yes, I worked as a git consultant for a while, the delete-a-single-line with the commit message "Fixed" is always the culprit!Further reading: https://cbea.ms/git-commit/Posted in tech | Leave a reply16 Feb2022Weekly Planning with ObsidianKeeping on top of tasks at work has been a work in progress throughout my career. However now I'm doing a more managerial role, I also need to keep track of all the meetings and preparation/followup work in my meetings. I find my daily log fills so many pages of notebook that I moved my weekly plan to a separate section - and then to my preferred digital notes tool, Obsidian. If you're interested in my setup, read on. Continue reading →Posted in tech | Leave a replyTalks, Articles, Podcasts, and MoreHoss Talks Foss #54Hoss Talks Foss, March 2022 Open Source is Good for BusinessPHP UK, February 2022 Scaling Developer SuccessPeritus.ai Podcast, February 2022 Developer Docs and Mental HealthPolyglot Podcast, January 2022 AdventocadoAdventocado, December 2021 Starting up Startup DevRelDevRelCon, November 2021 Me [email protected]@lornajanehttps://github.com/lornajanehttps://twitch.tv/lornajanetv Also Me © 2006-2022 LornaJane.netIcons courtesy of The Noun Project