Posts on For my friendgineers

From the “Listen to Hillel” file, an article on Verification First Development.

Seen on Bluesky Homeownership is a lifelong commitment to discovering what it takes to modernize a legacy system and the lengths to which you will go and compromises you will make in doing so.

Safety nets and guardrails sound like the same thing, but they’re not.

From the design by counter-example file, this might be the most practical definition of “unclean” code I’ve ever seen.

Yesterday I talked about different kinds of tests, unit, integration, and system.

Whether you are thinking about unit vs integration vs system tests, or build (or save) time vs check in time vs release time tests, what you’re really thinking about is test classification and test hierarchy.

It’s been a while since I’ve published a new entry.

As I’ve mentioned previously, Winnie the Pooh makes a great coach for folks interested in extreme programming.

I’ve said before that It Depends is just E_INSUFFICIENT_CONTEXT written so humans can understand it.

A long time ago I read a story by Eric Frank Russell, And Then There Were None.

I’ve talked about the Eisenhower matrix before.

I’m a big proponent of agile (lower case a) development practices and Test Driven Development (TDD) in particular.

Programming is a social activity.

There are lots of reasons to have high internal software quality (ISQ).

I’ve talked about code reviews before.

What if I told you that your time was limited?

I’ve always liked Winnie the Pooh.

George Boole brought us Boolean algebra.

Today’s thought is courtesy of the inimitable @mipsytipsy (Charity Majors).

Like many things, I’ve talked about Flow and WIP before.

This is something I keep coming back to.

I’ve talked about estimation many times before.

They say with motorcycles there are riders that have laid their bike down at least once, and there are riders that will lay there bike down in the future.

The Big Lebowski is a cult classic from the late 90s.

Skill and experience can have a lot in common.

From Star Trek to Hofstadter’s Law, estimates are always a conundrum.

I’ve always been a reader of science fiction.

Happy New Year!

I’ve been a subscriber of Kent Beck’s Tidy First?

Everyone’s got opinions.

Stop designing up front the moment you start speculating. – Kent Beck That’s a pretty bold statement.

I’ve talked about taking breaking things down many times.

Overheard: … coming from another language and trying to find the library that makes it look like the language you came from is a trap Pretty much all of the languages we write code in today are turing complete, meaning they can be used to write a program…

I don’t often give career advice.

According to the Hacker Ethic, per Steven Levy in Hackers, all information should be free.

Perspective is important.

A while back I talked about The Three Tells.

I recently finished listening to the first chapter of Worlds Beyond Number.

I ran across the term shallow hurry the other day and it resonated deeply (no pun intended) with me.

Taking a break from the book reviews, but sticking with the theme of software development being a social endeavor, there are many ways to get teams working on things together and doing them in a similar fashion.

Now that I’ve written about Seeing Like A State, I want to talk about How Buildings Learn.

I was going to compare and contrast Scott’s Seeing Like A State with Brand’s How Buildings Learn, but when I went to find the link to what I wrote, I realized that How Buildings Learn is going to have to wait, because, somehow, I haven’t directly talked a…

Mini rant today.

I’ve talked about time before.

In software, we’re very familiar with the idea of a milestone, but not steppingstones.

Software design is not about minimizing design complexity, but rather spending our complexity budget where it can do the most good. — Kent Beck Let’s face it.

There was an article a few weeks ago about how the Amazon video team switched one of their tools from a distributed microservice architecture to a monolith that runs/scales on EC2.

Continuing on with looking at numbers, think about counting.

I’m pretty sure this story is true, because I’ve heard it too many times, sometimes from people who could have been there.

“If you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that you play that determines if it’s good or bad.”