You can have your cake and eat it, as long as you bake it carefully.
‘We can do this the quick way and pay later, or the thorough way and pay now.’ This seems to be a fundamental dichotomy in software development, between ‘perfectionism’ and ‘pragmatism’, but I do not think it has to be a trade-off at all.
I have been building my website with Hugo since early 2021. I love the control it gives me. I recently wanted to start using short URLs in presentations, that would link to either a longer URL on the website or to somewhere else altogether.
It turns out Hugo makes this easy but not entirely obvious, so I thought I would write it up.
McKinsey recently published an article claiming they can measure developer productivity. This has provoked something of a backlash from some prominent software people, but I have not seen anyone engage with the content of the article itself, so I thought this would be useful.
I am writing this as though the authors have approached me for a technical review of their article. You can think of it as an open letter.
What started as lighthearted iconoclasm, poking at the bear of SOLID, has developed into something more concrete and tangible. If I do not think the SOLID principles are useful these days, then what would I replace them with? Can any set of principles hold for all software? What do we even mean by principles?
Or how programmers and testers can work together for a happy and fulfilling life.
Why don’t we just automate all the testing? Is test coverage a useful metric? What does it mean to “shift testing left”? When and where should we be testing? How much is enough testing?
“If you had to offer some principles for modern software development, which would you choose?”
At a recent Extreme Tuesday Club (XTC) virtual meet-up, we were discussing whether the SOLID principles are outdated. A while ago I gave a tongue-in-cheek talk on the topic, so ahead of the meet-up one of the organisers asked what principles I would replace SOLID with since I disagreed with them. I have been thinking about this for some time and I proposed five of my own, which form the acronym CUPID.
My friend Gojko Adzic has been running a series of BDD quizzes illustrating different ways to approach some interesting BDD situations. I noticed on Twitter that Seb Rose, another BDDer (Cucumberer?), had gently taken issue with one of Gokjo’s solutions so I thought I’d take a look at them both. Before reading on I recommend reading Gojko’s solution and Seb’s response for context.
At the end of 2009 I left the world of agile delivery and consulting to join a small team in a trading firm. I was member number three. The team grew to five in the next few weeks. This team was the most insanely effective delivery machine I’ve ever been a part of. A handful of programmers sitting in amongst a handful of traders, producing state-of-the-art trading systems—with all the integration pain (back office, risk management, connecting to electronic exchanges) that involves—in weeks. Not months, weeks. This is, of course, impossible.
I’ve noticed a number of people recently declaring that BDD really is just TDD, such as Robert Martin on Twitter and Ron Jeffries on the XP list. I can understand where this mindset comes from and I’d like to offer my perspective.
I’ve been using JavaScript for a while now, but only really programming in anger with it during the last year. I’ve found it in turns frustrating and enlightening, ridiculous and brilliant. I have never felt so empowered by a language and its ecosystem, so I thought I’d take some time to write about why that is. I’m starting with a ramble through the history of JavaScript, or rather my undoubtedly inaccurate understanding of it, to provide some context for where and how I’ve been using it.
It’s November, and it seems I haven’t posted anything here since January. Partly that’s because I have a Proper Job™ these days, which means I spend a lot less time writing and blogging. Partly I’ve rediscovered the joy of actually programming, which means I get to spend most of my time hacking on code.
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 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.