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Soapbox

DRY is for Martini: I liked the quotation from this post: “code duplication is OVER *FUCKING* RATED. DRY is for Martini. Yes, I'm exaggerating” I was thinking about this because I found myself recently bemoaning my terrible code, where I was doing the exact same thing in two different places, and getting bitten when fixing the code in one place and not the other. Except the entire point is that it only happened to be the exact same thing, at that time. When it needed to change in only the one place, and not the other, I remembered that sometimes DRY...; posted @ Monday, May 20, 2013 12:01 AM | Feedback (0)

Repost: Unraveling the Developer Bias in Agile Development Practices: There is a little bit of irony in reposting this, as I think the concept of “Enterprise Architect” is not only bankrupt, but almost always harmful. In fact, I read most of Nick’s posts and think to myself something along the lines of “it’s kind of a shame to be doing something largely pointless.” But, I tend to agree with most of what he says here, especially little things like this: “As an agilest, I value people over processes. That means I value the contribution of individual experts on my team to do their work with excellence, and...; posted @ Tuesday, April 16, 2013 10:08 AM | Feedback (0)

Yet another reason why the software craftsmanship movement sucks: Here’s the description of the talk: “In this talk Robert C. Martin outlines the practices used by software craftsmen to maintain their professional ethics. He resolves the dilemma of speed vs. quality, and mess vs schedule. He provides a set of principles and simple Dos and Don’ts for teams who want to be counted as professional craftsmen.” The video sounds like it was recorded next to a cocktail party. You can always hear what Uncle Bob says, I never had a problem with that. Just keep that in mind if you listen to it. Now, as...; posted @ Wednesday, March 13, 2013 9:31 PM | Feedback (0)

Software Craftsman Myopia: Uncle Bob: “In another 10 or 15 years TDD will likely be as prevalent and important to programmers as hand-washing is to surgeons or double-entry bookkeeping is to accountants. I stand a good chance of seeing that happen.” Alexander Tarnowski: “The ability to deliver tested and integrated software whenever we want to will be taken for granted. There will be no holy test and staging environments that some hero set up once and nobody dares to touch (for they’d break anyway). ” Bullshit. Bet very very heavily on the under here.; posted @ Wednesday, March 06, 2013 11:29 AM | Feedback (0)

Uncle Bob is a consultant: Not that there’s anything wrong with being a consultant, of course. <rant> Apparently Uncle Bob has never heard of Twitter (the company, not the technology). Here’s his latest “please hire me at hundreds of dollars an hour to peddle dogma, and if you question me, I’m going to use ‘I’m old’ as a response” post. I think the saddest thing about the Software Kraftsman Kult is this desperate clinging to shibboleths. “TDD simply must be right, in every instance and at all times!!!!!” Whenever some peddler wants to peddle some ‘Best Practices’ shit, remember the truth:...; posted @ Wednesday, March 06, 2013 11:20 AM | Feedback (2)

Well said about WCF: Had one of ‘those’ discussions recently about WCF. Ugh. “As a side note, a part of me still thinks that WCF was built on a bit of a dare or as an experiment to see if Microsoft could make even the nicest person (not me) curse like an irate and drunken pirate when trying to deploy WCF apps out into the wild. I've never encountered anything more heavily coupled, horribly overbuilt, and tediously demanding of error-prone configuration, reconfiguration, subconfiguration in my entire life.” From: http://www.devproconnections.com/article/development/json-net-serialization-145323?elqCampaignId=1252; posted @ Friday, March 01, 2013 11:50 PM | Feedback (0)

Delivery vs Quality: I realize that just about anybody reading this will immediately think “but we can have both.” I understand that. This is just an example. At a client once, I came aboard with a bunch of other consultants around the same time (sometimes organizations do these weird things like letting entire groups of consultants go, along with their gained knowledge, and then have to pay the cost of having that knowledge needing to be relearned. There are ways that organizations can learn to do such things better, but I digress). With a large installed base of applications, various consultants were...; posted @ Thursday, February 21, 2013 11:44 AM | Feedback (0)

Becoming a Certified ScrumMaster: As part of a current role at a multinational financial organization, I had to take a two-day course and pass the test to become a CSM. Here are a couple of notes about that. The first thing to note is that the presenter, from RippleRock, was top notch. He was well experienced, highly knowledgeable, not a fanatical puritan, and British, to boot, which allowed me to spend the two days compiling a list of British idioms that I could then look up on the web. Fantastic, I had no idea “pants” could be used as a derogatory term, awesome....; posted @ Wednesday, November 14, 2012 10:12 PM | Feedback (0)

Bad analogy time: It's okay to be a line cook: I was trying to explain to non-software developers a certain point, and came up with one of my typically bad analogies. Though I hate the term, I guess I have to admit that I qualify as being a 'foodie.' Though I tend to discount some of the more political aspects of it, I buy into the whole food to table thing, cook for myself, believe in using local ingredients, and all that stuff. Because I am lucky enough to be financially successful, I enjoy the occasional visit to Michelin starred restaurants. I also remember being, in a much...; posted @ Thursday, November 01, 2012 12:13 AM | Feedback (0)

Software Development != Writing Code: The disconnect between these two has been highlighted by recent events. The end requirement was clear. A couple of changes that the business wanted, prioritized and re-prioritized to a certain list. A couple of changes that could be completed in a few days and fit into the long list of various requirements that the business wants, a business that has very little resources available for testing. The developer in question though sees the ugliness in the entire codebase, it makes him uncomfortable. He sees all of the places where it goes against what a software craftsman believes in. ...; posted @ Thursday, November 01, 2012 12:00 AM | Feedback (0)

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