experiences in software development
Someone recently asked me for information on starting new consulting engagements. A few years back I published Sean Doran and Scott Conley's thoughts on Being a Lead Consultant . Sean and Scott's list is great for any lead consultant, and the advice applies well for the lifetime of a project. I considered sending that list to the person looking for new engagement advice, but I'm not sure that list…
I currently work on a pretty small team, 4 devs (including myself). We have no one dedicated strictly to QA. A few years ago we ran into a few unexpected issues with our software. I hesitate to call them bugs, because they only appeared when you did things that made little sense. We write internal-only software, thus we expect a minimum level of competency from our users. In addition, it's…
Recently, Stephen Schaub asked the following on the wewut group : Several of the unit test examples in the book verify the construction of both HTML and plain text strings. Jay recommends using literal strings in the assertions. However, this strikes me as not a particularly maintainable approach. If the requirements regarding the formatting of these strings changes (a very likely scenario), every…
The vast majority of books I purchase are for my own enjoyment, but not all of them. There are a few books that I buy over and over, and drop on the desks of friends and colleagues. These books, all technical, are books that I think most programmers will benefit from reading. I call these books "Drop Books"; I drop them and never expect them to be returned. My main motivation for dropping books is…
Michael Feathers , Brian Marick , and I are collaborating to create a new book: Unit Testing Points of View ... probably. Origin In 2014 Martin Fowler provided Technical Review for Working Effectively with Unit Tests . As part of his feedback he said something along the lines of: I'm glad you wrote this book, and I'll likely write a bliki entry noting what I agree with and detailing what I would…
Earlier this year, Ade published Awkward questions for those boarding the microservices bandwagon . I think the list is pretty solid, and (with a small push from Ade) I decided to write concise details on my experience. I think it's reasonable to start with a little context building. When I started working on the application I'm primarily responsible for microservices were very much fringe. Fred…
In 2006 Martin Fowler wrote about Code Ownership . It's a quick read, I'd recommend checking it out if you've never seen it. At the time I was working at ThoughtWorks; I remember thinking "Clearly Strong makes no sense and I have no idea what scenario would make Weak reasonable". 8 years later, I find myself advocating for Weak Code Ownership within my team. Collective Code Ownership (CCO) served…
I'm a big fan of https://gist.github.com/ for sharing code. It's fantastic for quickly putting something online to talk over with someone else. I've often found myself wishing for something that allowed me to share rendered HTML in the same way. For example, a gist of the HTML for this blog entry can be seen here: https://gist.github.com/jaycfields/82e2cc0a588bd83a91f4 . If I want someone to give…
Most traditional organizations have an Org Chart that looks similar to the following: Org Charts displayed in this way emphasize the chain of command. A quick look at a node in this Org Chart will let you know who someone reports to and who reports to them. The chart gives a clear indication of responsibility; it also gives an impression of "who's in charge" and how far away you are from the top.…
I recently wrote about my experiences working on a remote team . Within that blog entry you can find a more verbose version of the following text: Communication is what I consider to be the hardest part of remote work. I haven't found an easy, general solution. A few teammates prefer video chat, others despise it. A few teammates like the wiki as a backlog, a few haven't ever edited the wiki. Some…
Over 18 months ago I wrote Year Five , an experience report I never imagined I would write. I closed the blog entry by saying I look forward to writing about Year Six . A year and a half later, I'm still having a hard time deciding what (if anything) I should write. My writers block isn't the result the Remote Work experiment failing. Quite the opposite, the success of the Remote Work experiment…
Today marks the official release release of Working Effectively with Unit Tests. The book is available in various formats: DRM free pdf, epub, & mobi (Kindle) at http://leanpub.com/wewut Softcover at http://amzn.com/1503242706 Kindle edition at http://amzn.com/B00QS2HXUO I’m very happy with the final version. Michael Feathers wrote a great foreword. I incorporated feedback from dozens of people -…
In the past few months I've seen more than a few articles encouraging programmers to write books. Each article provides at least a bit of good advice, and proceeds to conclude with the same idea: You should write a book to build your brand . I find this conclusion accurate and extremely disappointing. If the overwhelming reason to write a book is brand building, then the pool of potential authors…
Originally found in Working Effectively with Unit Tests It’s common to unit test at the class level. The Foo class will have an associated FooTests class. Solitary Unit Tests follow two additional constraints: Never cross boundaries The Class Under Test should be the only concrete class found in a test. Never cross boundaries is a fairly simple, yet controversial piece of advice. In 2004, Bill…
I finally put the finishing touches on the rough draft of Working Effectively with Unit Tests . It's been an interesting journey thus far, and I'm hoping the attention to detail I've put into the rough draft will translate into an enjoyable read. What I did poorly: I'd written the book's sample before I ever put it on leanpub . Before a book is published you can collect contact and price…
Unit Testing has moved from fringe to mainstream, which is a great thing. Unfortunately, as a side effect developers are creating mountains of unmaintainable tests. I've been fighting the maintenance battle pretty aggressively for years, and I've decided to write a book that captures what I believe is the most effective way to test. From the Preface Over a dozen years ago I read Refactoring for…
DHH recently wrote a provocative piece that gave some views into how he does and doesn't test these days. While I don't think I agree with him completely, I applaud his willingness to speak out against TDD dogma. I've written publicly about not buying the pair-programming dogma, but I hadn't previously been brave enough to admit that I no longer TDD the vast majority of the time. The truth is, I…
When I describe my current workflow I use the TLA RDD, which is short for REPL Driven Development. I've been using REPL Driven Development for all of my production work for awhile now, and I find it to be the most effective workflow I've ever used. RDD differs greatly from any workflow I've used in the past, and (despite my belief that it's superior) I've often had trouble concisely describing…
A teammate of mine recently expressed a desire for a shortcut for something we type often. I started looking into our shortcut options and came to a common determination: We can do this, but the number of 2 key shortcuts available to us is finite, so we better use them wisely. I wrote the following unix to give me a rough idea of what we type frequently. find . -name "*.clj" | xargs cat | tr -s…
I've you've ever looked at the docs for clojure's for macro, then you probably know about the :let, :when, and :while modifiers. What you may not know is that those same modifiers are available in doseq . I was recently working with some code that had the following form. Upon seeing this code, John Hume asked if I preferred it to a single doseq with multiple bindings. He sent over an example that…
I love using partial, but I dislike the length of the function name. There's a simple solution, define another function with a shorter name that simply calls (or is) partial. This is exactly what I did in the jry library. I liked the use of % due to partial feeling similar to creating a function using #(), and % having a special meaning inside #(). I thought they tied well together. Unfortunately,…
I recently refactored some code that takes longs from two different sources to compute one value. The code originally stored the longs and called a function when all of the data arrived. The refactored version partials the data while it's incomplete and executes the partial'd function when all of the data is available. Below is a contrived example of what I'm taking about. Let's pretend we need a…
I recently typed out a long, thoughtful response in a textarea. I clicked submit, like I've done millions of times, and I got the dreaded "session expired" error message. This happens very, very rarely, but it's devastating when it does. Creating long & thoughtful responses isn't something that comes naturally for me. I crossed my fingers and clicked back. No luck, web 2.0 dynamically created text…
When I was doing a fair bit of Ruby I often used the TextMate 's shortcut (Ctrl+:) to convert a Ruby String to a Symbol or a Ruby Symbol to a String. It's something I've periodically missed while doing Clojure, and yesterday I found myself in the middle of a refactoring that was going to force the conversion of 5+ Clojure Keywords to Strings. The following emacs lisp is my solution for toggling…
The average lifespan for a software engineering job is 4 years. Okay, I've never actually seen proof (or contradiction), but that's the general feeling in the groups I associate with. Perhaps that's selection bias - my employer has generally changed on year 3 or 4. Perhaps this is the exception and not the rule, in that case feel free to simply read this as an experience report. However, I do…