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Agile software development defers business issues
My colleague Michael Brunton-Spall makes an interesting mistake in his latest blog post: much of our time as developers is being completely wasted writing software that someone has told us is...
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Up-front quality
There has been a great exchange on the London Clojurians mailing list recently talking about the impact of a good REPL on development cycles. The conversation kicks into high-gear with this post from...
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The sly return of Waterfall
No-one does Waterfall any more of course, we’re all Agile incrementalists. It is just that a lot of things are difficult to tackle in increments. You can’t get a great design, for example, or a visual...
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The gold-plated donkey cart
I'm not sure if he came up with the term but I'm going to credit this idea to James Lewis who used it in relation to a very stuck client we were working on at ThoughtWorks. The golden donkey cart is a...
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In praise of fungible developers
The “fungibility” of developers is a bit of hot topic at the moment. Fungibility means the ability to substitute one thing for another for the same effect; so money is fungible for goods in modern...
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Programming as Pop Culture
The “programming is pop culture” quote has been doing the rounds from a 2004 interview with Alan Kay in terms of the debate on the use of craft as a metaphor for development. Here’s a recap: …as...
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No-one loves bad ideas
Charles Arthur has an interesting piece of post-Guardian vented frustration on his blog. His argument about developers and journalists sitting together is part-bonkers opinion and partly correct....
View ArticleTackley’s law of caching
Tackley’s law of caching is that the right cache time is the time it takes someone to come to your desk to complain about a problem. If you obey this law then when you open your browser to check the...
View ArticleRecommendation: use explicit type names
I attended an excellent talk recently at Lambdale about teaching children to code (not just Scratch but actual computer languages) and one of the points of feedback was that the children found the use...
View ArticlePR Reviews: not the messiah, not a naughty boy
On Tech Twitter there seems to be a lot of chat recently about how the Github Pull Request (PR) review process is “broken” or underserves internal teams (an example) that have strong collaboration...
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