Well, I certainly didn’t expect that kind of interest in my last post. In the past I’ve tended to have a few hundred people reading my infrequent mumblings. In the last few days nearly 20,000 people have popped by according to my site statistics, leaving nearly 150 comments. Crikey!
Software Craftsmanship risks putting the software at the centre rather than the benefit the software is supposed to deliver, mostly because we are romantics with big egos. Programming is about automating work like crunching data, processing and presenting information, or controlling and automating machines.
Last year I wrote about how we are doing planning all wrong, or rather, how we seem to focus on the wrong things when we do planning. We obsess about stories and story points and estimation, because that’s what we’ve been taught to do.
I’ve been in the IT industry for about 20 years now, and for nearly the last 8 years I’ve been a consultant with the rather excellent ThoughtWorks. Being anywhere for that long in our industry is quite uncommon, and to spend that long in a consulting role, with all the travel and disruption that implies, is even more so. I’ve had a fantastic time with ThoughtWorks and I feel I’ve grown tremendously during the time I was there. Eventually something had to give though, so at the end of last year I decided it was time to try something else.
Once upon a time there was a lady in a taxi. It took such a long time for the lady to get to her destination in the taxi that she went to the town hall and told the man from the council. The man from the council wanted to figure out why the taxi journey was so slow, so he placed cameras at all the traffic lights in the town to measure how many cars went past, and how quickly. The traffic light cameras would click every time a car went past the lights.
I currently have a backlog of about 15 blog articles I am failing to finish. The most embarrassingly laggy one dates from around the end of 2007. Now I know I’m a slacker.
However, others have been far more industrious than me.
I am delighted to announce the official Japanese translation of Introducing BDD.
I’m delighted to be taking part in a In the brain of… session organized by the folks at SkillsMatter.
Business people want estimates. They want to know how much it’s going to cost them to get a solution, and they want to know how likely it is to come in on time and on budget. And of course quality is not negotiable.
There’s a one day domain-driven design event happening at SkillsMatter this Friday, 19 June in London. I’m not speaking this time so I get to sit back and enjoy some talented folks talking about really applying DDD rather than just theoretical stuff.