A software bug in a Therac-25 radiation therapy machine caused the death of five patients after receiving a massive dose of X-rays.

Knight Capital lost half a billion dollars in half an hour when a software bug allowed computers to sell and buy millions of shares with no human oversight.

These and many other stories tell how seemingly unimportant bugs can actually cause so many tragic disasters.

When some software engineers see an article mentioning the word senior, they may immediately run away and ignore it. They can be intimidated just by the title.

Yes, being a senior engineer requires a lot of time and experience, but you can still be a great engineer. A great junior engineer. A great intermediate engineer.

You write clean code. You follow best practices. You do a really good job.

Being good at what you do can help accelerate your path to becoming a senior engineer, or even a CTO.

Now, without further ado, let’s get started.

The first thing that…

I like playing basketball, but even if I wear Air Jordans, I would still not be able to dunk like Michael Jordan. I would neither be able to score three shots like Stephen Curry simply by wearing Under Armours.

That is also the case with writing.

A lot of top writers have not become so skillful at their craft based on using the most advanced and highest rated applications.

Still, we are constantly being bombarded by thousands of tools and apps that try to attract us to use them, that we are even faced with dilemmas about which tool we…

You move to a new city and you don’t know where the nearest grocery store is.

You don’t beat yourself up — it’s normal. You just use Google Maps to find it.

After you’ve been there several times, it’s highly likely that you won’t need to use Google Maps.

It’s the same with other places, like the nearest restaurant, or sports center — at first, you perhaps need to use Google Maps, then you learn the locations yourself and no longer need to use it.

You learn them but it’s not that you’re intentionally trying to memorize every road, every…

GitHub is one of the most popular version-control repositories. In it, you can find countless public projects in many programming languages.

You can use it to share your work, collaborating with your team members and others. You can also use it to learn from some of the most used open-source libraries in countless software projects and have the chance to contribute to them. Although we may use it several times throughout the week, there are many ways we can benefit even more from it.

Here’s a list to help with that.

Awesome Autocomplete for GitHub

You may have cases when you may need to do some authorizations for certain pages so they can’t be accessed by unauthorized clients. There are many authorization methods you can use in a Ruby on Rails application.

In this article, I’ll mention one very simple (yet not so famous) method that comes implemented and ready to be used each time you create a new Rails application.

ActionController::HttpAuthentication::Basic has a method called http_basic_authenticate_with that you usually need to invoke in the top lines of your controller.

Rails is an open-source framework, so we’re thankfully able to see the implementation and the…

Medium is a great place to write. You get to publish your articles and reach a large audience. It’s especially good for developers, who are active and like reading about programming topics.

If you are an author on Medium writing about technology and programming, the chances are that you will need to insert code snippets that are syntax highlighted and formatted by inserting them from GitHub Gists.

You want your code to look pretty here — just as it looks in your favorite editor.

The process of inserting a code snippet on a Medium is long and tedious. You need…

If you are living on the 10th floor of a building, are you going to take the stairs or use the elevator?

The goal in both cases is the same: You want to go back to your apartment after a long day at work.

Of course, taking the stairs is better if you are a busy person who doesn’t have time to go to the gym and wants to use the stairs as a simplified version of the cardio exercises. But, aside from that, you are more likely to take the elevator.

Let’s take another example.

Let’s say that you…