I’m back from the ESRI Developer Summit. While suffering from severe jet lag I’ve spent the last couple of days in slow reflection. The biggest impact the conference had on me was a keynote held by Alan Cooper.
Early in his talk he put me in a defensive mode by stating that agile processes are bad [...]
Paul W. Homer has a post up discussing essential development problems. While this is a huge subject (somewhat reflected by the size Paul’s article,) I’d like to emphasize one of the things he touches: the lack of understanding the users’ problem domain.
The biggest problem in most systems today is the total failure of the programmers [...]
Isn’t life funny? Two weeks ago I stated my opinion that unit-testing graphical user interfaces isn’t worth the trouble. Now I find myself doing it, writing unit-tests for GUI components.
What happened, did I come to my senses or go crazy (pick the expression that fits your point of view) during Christmas holidays? No, I still [...]
Christmas for me is celebration, gormandizing and the joy of happy children. It’s also a time for rest and reflection, and when I think back on this year there is one thing that disturbs me: for me this was a year of us and them.
The company I work for is divided; we have three divisions [...]
I’m currently rereading parts of the book Test-Driven Development: A Practical Guide, by David Astels. It’s a great book in many ways, well worth reading, but I have objections to one particular section in the book.
The author tries to convince me that developing my user interfaces using a test-driven approach is a good thing to [...]
I’m an impatient person, of the kind that are comfortable with making quick decisions on loose grounds, but prepared to change when more information gets available. This attitude has served me well, but also put me in trouble when important decisions were made too hastily. That’s why I always use The Rule of Three nowadays.
I [...]
I just finished reading an interesting post by Ben Collins-Sussman. In an attempt to argue that distributed version control is not the silver bullet, he classifies us and puts us into two groups, which he calls the 80% and the 20%.
The 20% folks are what many would call “alpha” programmers — the leaders, trailblazers, [...]
When should you start optimizing your system? There are different opinions: Some think you should finish the implementation of all important features before starting the process of tuning. Others mean that this is way too late and instead advocate early optimizations, arguing that it’ll reduce the risk of substantial rewrites later on.
I recommend doing optimizations [...]
As a programmer you are the ultimate software development tool, and like any tool you need regular care to stay effective. If you don’t invest enough in self-improvement you’ll end up useless, with a blunt sword. I’ve seen many programmers wielding blunt swords, unable to fight their ways out of old habits and paradigms. Don’t [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot lately on the sad state of our business. A majority of software development projects fail in terms of money, time or quality. Why is this so? Why is developing software so expensive and so unpredictable?
Paul W. Homer touches an interesting subject in his post named Repeated Expressions. He means that [...]
