Welcome! 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 Blog
11 Apr
2022
Outline your writing to ease the creative process
For 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
31 Mar
2022
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 to
- Yourself, when you get a pull request review and can't remember which commit something is in that needs to be removed
- Yourself, debugging how this ended up like this, 6 months from now
- Your colleague, eyeballing your work to see how you are getting on
Personally, 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/
16 Feb
2022
Weekly Planning with Obsidian
Keeping 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
