In my last post about the terrible ironies of programming, I foreshadowed the next terrible irony: Plus being at a computer and away from people is pretty attractive for weird little nerds who aren’t good with people So many people go into programming thinking they’ll be left alone to code then find out programming is fundamentally a team sport. Even I used to joke that I didn’t decide to work.. Read More
When you ask your team for an estimate for a project, don’t give them an estimate to start from. If you do, you’ll likely cause anchoring bias. If you’re right, no harm done, but what if you’re not? I mean, the point of asking your team for an estimate is to get another, likely better informed opinion on how long the project is likely to take. If you accidentally bias.. Read More
One of the problems that really interests me lately is decision-making. Specifically, how teams can make decisions without wasting a ton of time going back and forth about what they’re going to do, and how they can prevent time-thieves from re-opening decisions they weren’t happy with. The simple matrix described in This Matrix Helps Growing Teams Make Great Decisions at First Round Review seems like a fantastic alternative to endless.. Read More
Today’s link is about a way to make sure you actually remember to remove that code you need for now but not forever: Sunset testing for short-lived code by Emily Nakashima I like this link because even though I rely on computers to remember things for me a lot, I never thought of adding a test with an expiry date to force me to remember to remove code, or at.. Read More
There are a bunch of bitterly ironic things about the software industry. Let’s talk about one of them! Programmers love to feel smart and chose a profession that makes us feel stupid all the freaking time. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like feeling smart but let’s be honest, programmers really like feeling smart. So many of us were weird nerds as kids and being smart was the one thing.. Read More
Read the slides and speaker notes for Tanya Reilly’s excellent talk Being Glue right now! Seriously, this talk is so great. If you do glue work (that is, extremely important technical work that keeps teams and projects on track, like reviewing designs and seeing what’s missing, noticing that another team is working on something similar to your team and coordinating the two teams so they don’t duplicate each other’s work,.. Read More
The more I work with deep inheritance hierarchies, the more I wonder if inheritance is actually a good idea. If you’re looking to avoid the trouble overusing inheritance can get you into, this article has some handy tips: Inheritance is evil. Stop using it.
We all know we have personal biases, but have you ever thought about your software design biases? I certainly didn’t until I read this article about Software Design Bias by Sandro Mancuso. If you’re having trouble with the design of a piece of software, it’s worth taking a look at Sandro’s handy list of biases and thinking about whether the way you prefer to design software is actually the best.. Read More
Persistence is enormously valuable, I even believe it’s more important than intelligence if you want to a programmer, but knowing when to quit is valuable too. That’s why I like I successfully chased my Big Life Dream, and I hated it by Rowen, so much. Their dream was to travel the world in a sailboat, yours might be to become a freelancer, to start your own business, to switch to game.. Read More
Learning Fluency, by Sara Simon is a really interesting article and you should definitely read it. It’s kind of hard to summarize, what I got from it was that there are a lot of parallels between learning natural languages and learning to program, one of which is that rote memorization is both really useful and really underrated. Variables and loops are really boring for experienced programmers (which I’m suspicious is.. Read More