All things Software related
Do you spend your time researching and debugging bugs that aren’t really bugs? They turn out to be misconfigurations, or the system functions as designed, but perhaps not as this customer expects? How do you improve the quality of the bugs you get, so that you don’t spend time trying to track down false positives? … Read more
When an organization moves away from a centralized monolith to more decentralized and distributed architectures, such as microservices, the development culture, and therefore, the culture around the system’s architecture also changes. It too must become more distributed and less centralized. Development teams, because they are ideally autonomous in a microservices environment, require more freedom than … Read more
Do you lead your customers, or follow them? Most companies really start by following the customers. That is how you get capital, you prove there is a need, and that you can fill that need. It may be a need that nobody has seen before, or tried to do anything about before, but you are … Read more
Do you know what you want, and who you want to be? It seems like developers quite often do not actually know this, or if they do, they do not take any steps to lead them down the road they want to walk. Where do you want to be in your career in 5 years? … Read more
A few of my recent topics here have been on what legacy code is, and possible ways to stop writing new code that turns into legacy code as soon as you push it to master. I think one of the best ways to avoid this is to write code with empathy. If you are unfamiliar … Read more
For a technology organization to say that it is polyglot is one of those hot “new” catch-phrases. Why is this something that organizations strive for, and what are the ramifications of actually being polyglot? Benefits One of the most commonly offered benefits of polyglot is that teams can choose the language that best fits the … Read more
Playing is the best way to learn. Children love playing. It is simply what they do; and that is fantastic. That is how they learn. As we grow older, we view playing as something the kids do. If we happen to have children ourselves, we will perhaps play with them, but outside of that, we … Read more
What makes one a software architect? Is it just a title you get to apply to yourself after x amount of experience? Are there classes and certifications you need to have? Is it the group of developers that don’t (or can’t) develop any more? One possible definition of architect that I quite like is from … Read more
As developers, we seem to do things to ourselves that are just plain evil. Perhaps it is a shortcut right now, but sometimes in the future it will come back to bite us hard. This isn’t always what we might consider technical debt, but that can be a part of it. Sometimes we even do … Read more
There are many definitions out there for what counts as legacy software. For a long time my favorite was from Michael Feathers, which was something along the lines of “any code that does not have tests”. “They are writing legacy code!” I have a new, related definition that seems to fit well too. Any piece … Read more