Monday Links 12

Simon Willison’s recommended engineering practices are rock solid:

• Documentation in the same repo as the code
• Mechanisms for creating test data
• Rock solid database migrations
• Templates for new projects and components
• Automated code formatting
• Tested, automated process for new development environments
• Automated preview environments

Also from Simon Willison: Documentation Unit Tests (or Test-Driven Documentation)

Keeping documentation synchronized with an evolving codebase is difficult. Without extreme discipline, it’s easy for documentation to get out-of-date as new features are added.
One thing that can help is keeping the documentation for a project in the same repository as the code itself. This allows you to construct the ideal commit: one that includes the code change, the updated unit tests AND the accompanying documentation all in the same unit of work.
When combined with a code review system (like Phabricator or GitHub pull requests) this pattern lets you enforce documentation updates as part of the review process: if a change doesn’t update the relevant documentation, point that out in your review!

In Aging Programmer, Jorge Manrubia reflects on 15 years of programming and what he has found to be true for himself.