Photoquarium Blog

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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At my day job we are in the midst of a pretty big change in the way we are interacting internally within out systems. To date we have been interacting with a really ad-hock method which has caused a lot of dependencey issues and headache, especially when trying to upgrade anything.

So on our path toward SMWDA or Stable Modular Well Documented API’s, I have some across this article on the MSDN site. Now don’t let the fact that it is in MSDN Magazine and written by someone that develops on Microsoft’s platform deter you from reading it, it is a good read. It will also give you a little bit of an insight on the direction our code bases should be going.

Open Closed Principle

I was going to give a quick summary but the article isn’t that long and it does a better job than I can.

Lately there have been a few blog posts that I have read about whether to relay the benefits or features of a product to the user in an attempt to give them the best tools to choose your product. Some circles believe that you should list the benefits that a product produces instead of features since benefits can be understood easier by clients instead of a list of features (which can and most times are a technical list and confusing to the end user).

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I love how the internet just let you stumble onto new and great things. Be it the latest “Funniest Home Video” on youtube or another great blog writer. Just today I was going through my rss feeds and Max Pool had a quick little post on a new blogger he has been reading.

Now Max’s article isn’t much more than “I like his posts here are a few of my favs“. Short simple and piqued my interest.

So I went over to Jurgan Appelo’s blog and took a look at the arctiles and low and behold I think I agree with Max. Jurgan you have some great posts and I am going to add you to my feeds that I use to help better myself as a developer and aspiring Project Manager.

I could make a few posts on what I have taken away from each of the articles I have read on his blog but I don’t really have the time so here is a recap of the posts I read:

• Make It Simple vs Do It Simple
• Complex versus Complicated
• MoSCow Priorities
• The Single Above-Average Programmer

Plus I think if I read these posts again in a few months even I would get something different from them.

Thanks Max and Jurgen