Small Business Programming

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Tag: Professionalism

How to get hired as a team lead

December 18, 2022 / / 0 Comments

I see people make three huge mistakes when trying to transition from a developer position to a leadership position.

1 – being a “good” developer with lots of experience makes you qualified to run a project or a team. It’s just not true. Being a “good” developer with lots of experience is necessary, but not sufficient, to successfully make this transition.

2 – the idea that you actually know what a well-run, effective project actually looks like. Most people have never even seen a well-run, effective project. They have little idea of the results regularly achieved by the best teams.

3 – not adjusting your interview answers to reflect the kind of thinking and strategizing effective leader engage in to be successful.

In this post I’ll show you things from the employer’s perspective and help you get on the right track to get hired as a team lead.

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pilot in cockpit

Safety-Critical Software: 15 things every developer should know

March 1, 2020 / / 6 Comments

Despite being all around us, safety-critical software isn’t on the average developer’s radar. But recent failures of safety-critical software systems have brought one of these companies and their software development practices to the attention of the public. I am, of course, referring to Boeing’s two 737 Max crashes, the subsequent grounding of all 737 Max aircraft, and its failed Starliner test flight.

How could such a distinguished company get it so wrong? Weren’t the safety standards and certification process for safety-critical systems supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening? Where was the FAA when the Max was being certified? These questions raised my curiosity to the point that I decided to discover what this specialized field of software development is all about.

In this post I’m going to share what I learned about safety-critical software development and how a little knowledge of it might be useful to “normal” programmers like you and me.

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How I intend to become a better software developer

May 22, 2018 / / 1 Comment

My survey of the computer science literature suggests there are only two economical ways to achieve extremely low defect rates (< 1 defect per KLOC). The first way is to follow the Personal Software Process (PSP), which was created by Watts S. Humphrey at CMU. The second way is to use languages and tools that make it difficult to introduce errors into your code in the first place and easier to detect errors if you do manage to get some into your code. In this post I’m going to briefly discuss these two options and how I plan to explore them to become a better software developer.

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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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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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