Lucas F. Costa - Essays

A project's goal rarely has anything to do with implementing a list of features.

There are two *obvious* ways to use coding agents.

Somewhere in your company's Google Drive, there's a design doc from six months ago.

Every team must believe in improvement, even when it no longer happens.

When it comes to writing, the #1 question I usually get asked is how do I get so many HN front pages with this blog.

Do you remember your backlog ever shrinking?

The problem with Scrum is that it usually works.

Why did you choose Scrum instead of Kanban?

Deadlines are the bane of every software engineer's existence.

> *If you have played Ragnarok Online before, you might want to listen to [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Here's my horoscope for today: > Things should improve for you as the day progresses, Taurus.

Let me be clear: if they tell you it's a great idea but don't give you their credit card, they don't want it.

Welcome to Ultra Bikeshed Co.

Large enterprises aren't slow because they're large.

Daily stand-ups are a classic example of [learned helplessness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness).

Uncertainty is _not_ necessarily bad.

In this post, I'll present a robust and disruptive Agile framework.

Let's be honest.

**Yearly software development plans are my favourite genre of fiction**.

This is [Beigel Bake](https://bricklanebeigel.co.uk), in Brick Lane, London.

Most technical people choose GUIs not because GUIs are the best tool for the job.

I spent 2020 writing [a 500-pages book about JavaScript Testing](https://www.manning.com/books/testing-javascript-applications).

This blog post is about how to explain things in writing.

There are many ways of estimating how long a software project will take.

In the past thousand sprints, you've been consistently delivering plenty of code.

Specifications work in two ways: they inform developers what needs to be built, and they constrain the problem space so that tasks become approachable.

When writing JavaScript applications, you describe its dependencies using a `package.json` file.

It's Monday.

Not delivering early and frequently makes writing software as difficult as writing books.

I love streams because **I don't like software**.

> *TL;DR: [Here are my dotfiles](https://github.com/lucasfcosta/dotfiles).

This post aims to demystify bitwise operations in JavaScript, as they can be useful for a myriad of applications.

Counterintuitively, **test-driven development is not about tests**.

I often joke that **graphical interfaces are bloatware**.

This is the second blog post in my series about Lambda Calculus.

Even though lots of people nowadays advocate for applying functional programming principles to JavaScript, not many of them know the principles of Lambda Calculus and how it all started.

In this post, we will talk about **one of the most beautiful ideas in computer science: the Y-Combinator**.

I am not good with words.

**Git's `bisect` command is one of those things you will wish you've known since you started using `git` at all.** I don't use it that often, but whenever I do I ask myself how did I live without this for so long.

**Complaining about JS Fatigue is just like complaining about the fact that humanity has created too many tools to solve the problems we have**, from email to airplanes and spaceships.

In this blog post **I will prove you will never be able to write an algorithm that scales better than a pigeon** and also **teach you some basic concepts when it comes to Big O notation**.

Recently everyone seems to be really excited about functional programming and its concepts.

Hi, everyone!

Hello, everyone!

Hi, friends!

Hi, everyone!

Hi, everyone!

Hello, everyone!

Hello, everyone!

Hi, friends!