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Awesome, Aw … wait for it … wait for it …. SOME

I don’t think I could do justice to this post by summarizing it so I won’t.

If you have a few minutes to read this post I really encourage you to do so. Also post your comments here about the article, I would love to hear everyones take on this.

I’m off to read a bit on “complex adaptive systems theory” and “Evolutionary Stable Strategies”.

http://www.noop.nl/2009/02/the-decline-and-fall-of-agilists.html

During one of my many discussions with James, he brought up the question “What makes a good developer?” I didn’t have any really good answers but, as most things, someone else had encountered a similar question that has given me a bit of insight. Davey Brion wrote a post on his blog ElegantCode on Ethics In Software Development:Pragmatism Over Dogmatism where he describes what he thinks is the primary goal of a developer and how writing crappy code (or maintainingcrappy code over fixing it) is counterintuitive to the goals of a developer.

A software developer’s primary goal should be to create value for the users of a system. Value can mean a lot of things here. First and foremost, it should be about things that users actually experience. Features, ease of use, performance, etc. You can get all of those with crappy code, but that leads to a situation where you won’t be able to sustain that value in the long term. A system can be very useful to its users, but if the code is in such bad shape that it can’t easily be maintained and extended with new features over time, the value of the system will slowly reduce. New features will introduce new bugs. Bug fixes will introduce new bugs. Eventually, the system starts to collapse under its own rot and the dreaded rewrite commences. Nobody really wants this, do they? If you write good, clean code from the beginning, you can usually avoid these problems.

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Sometimes you encounter things at just the right time. This article is one of those things at the right time. Please read this article if you have ever had to deal with legacy code and muttered under you breath, “Can’t we just scrap this crap and start over”, when trying to fix an issue. Below is my spin on it for the situation I am in.

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For all of you out there that need or want to read up on software engineering or just want to pad their geek library with books that will get noticed, check out this list of The Top 100 best Software Engineering Books, Ever. 

This is a huge list and maybe you don’t agree with all these books as a “best ever” but it will give you some books to keep in mind as a start to increase you knowledge. Also he posted a follow up to this post here. Enjoy.

 photo credit: blu_blue