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A love letter to my IDE

November 27, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I am not a poet nor am I prone to making public displays of affection but I can’t help myself. I love you so much.

In the beginning

I’ve always had some kind of tool to help me write code. I’m almost embarrassed to say that I started my life as a programmer with a syntax highlighting text editor and an FTP program. I’d write my code, save it, FTP it to the server, and then run it to see if it “worked”. I know that sounds crazy now but it was the turn of the century and I was young and didn’t know any better.

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With great power comes great responsibility

November 20, 2017 / / 6 Comments

I recently got into a discussion in the comments section of someone else’s blog where I argued that many software developers are overly confident in their abilities. I further argued that this overconfidence leads to the kind of behavior that would be considered professional malpractice if a lawyer, doctor, or professional engineer did something similar in their respective field.

A fellow software developer expressed an opposing view. He made the following points:

  • only a small percentage of software can cause as much damage as medical or legal malpractice and that software is highly regulated
  • if we stop people from pursuing their interests it will stifle innovation, which he was very much against

I hear variations on this view quite often and I think it is worth exploring.

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Worthless software: risks and prevention

November 13, 2017 / / 3 Comments

We (software developers) write astounding amounts of worthless software. I find it hard to fathom just how much junk we are producing. As someone who spends a fair bit deal of time thinking and writing about how to be a 10x programmer and effectiveness, I believe we have lots of room for improvement here. In this post, I’m going to examine the problem of worthless software and what you can do about it.

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How to make time to repay your technical debt

November 6, 2017 / / 0 Comments

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about how to pay down your technical debt and most of them miss step one. They don’t tell you how to make the time to repay your technical debt. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to convince management to let you stop working on features and bug fixes to repay your technical debt for long enough to truly make a difference. And since it’s always hard to quantify the impact of repaying technical debt, it rarely gets to the top of anyone’s backlog. Well, I’m going show you how to get around this problem.

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Technical debt: we need better communication, not better metaphors

October 30, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Technical debt as a metaphor is not serving our profession well. It was meant to help us talk to business people and make better decisions about our software projects. But it has largely been a failure. Part of the problem is that business people aren’t afraid of future interest payments.

In business school, I learned about the power of leverage: what it is, how to get it, how to measure it, and how to manage it. Debt is a tool. My fellow business school grads are comfortable with leverage and debt. So when the programmers come to the business people complaining about technical debt, the business people are unconcerned. And why would they be? The metaphor is misleading; technical debt is only superficially similar to financial debt.

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A code review checklist prevents stupid mistakes

October 23, 2017 / / 5 Comments

My team uses a code review checklist to prevent stupid mistakes from causing us problems and wasting time. In this post, I want to share the reasons we decided to implement a code review checklist, what’s on our checklist, how we created, use, and improve our checklist, and how it’s improved our effectiveness.

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Optimal pull request size

October 16, 2017 / / 8 Comments

Every team has an optimal pull request size, it’s likely much smaller than you think, and making your pull requests your optimal size will improve the performance of your team. I’m going to convince you that these three statements are true by the end of this post.

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Is Uncle Bob serious?

October 9, 2017 / / 9 Comments

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) has been banging on the “software professionalism” drum for years and I’ve been nodding my head every with every beat. As a profession, I believe software developers need to up their game big time. However, I’ve become concerned about Uncle Bob’s approach. I reached my breaking point the other day when I read his blog post titled Tools are not the Answer.

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How to impress your boss AND earn major karma points

October 2, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Your boss likely has a to-do list with projects she would like to get done but can’t. She would jump at the chance to do these things if she could just pass them off to someone competent and manage them at arm’s length. These projects add value if they are done well (and your boss doesn’t have to babysit them) but they probably aren’t critical to the success of your company.

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What you should know about the Effective Executive: part 6

September 25, 2017 / / 0 Comments

This post is part of a series on The Effective Executive (by Peter F. Drucker). You can find the first post here. In this post I’m going to tackle chapter 7: effective decisions.

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