This is a collection of technical essays I've written over the years.
I am not a fan of story points. (I am also not a fan of estimates, but neither of these are battles I will win anytime soon.) However, my largest frustration with them is that the conversations they generate are poor, because the idea of what makes a story point is nebulous for most developers. The CURE framework is a tool that will help channel discussions by organizing them by the categories of…
There is a recurring complaint about the uselessness of software development (or engineering) managers in tech. At best, they’re considered a necessary evil. At worst, they’re incompetent programmers (or non-programmers1) who, through political means, weaseled into positions of power, became micromanagers, and actively impede the mission of getting software to customers. For some, they shouldn’t…
This article, like many things, started as a comment made on Hacker News: As the parent said: I guess the “No True Agile” crowd is as alive and well as they were 10 years ago. When it’s a failure, they always come out of the woodwork to let you know you weren’t doing it according to the orthodoxy. When you point out that it isn’t faster in practice, they gaslight you and claim that was never the…
One of the odd discourses in our industry is the value of documentation1. The early documentation discourse was seemingly, “the more, the better.” This followed out of some early general patterns of software creation: One set of practitioners would design the algorithms, and another set would turn the algorithms and punch it into the code itself2. When the cost in human effort of creating punch…
I have a lot more to write here, in more detail, but I have needed to describe this concept enough times that it’s valuable to get the bare minimum out there.
I was going through a practice interview problem and I had returned to it because I wanted to experiment when it struck me that I’d left myself a comment that I never deleted.
I don’t want this to be portrayed as a review of the book, because it is unfair to review a book seventeen years after its publish date. Our industry has changed, as has agile, and the problems we face today are based on a backlash against documentation that wasn’t valuable. Due to that, this book doesn’t have the value today that it did in 2003, but that isn’t an indictment of the book. Rather,…
Like many programmers and people exposed to Silicon Valley culture, I’ve noticed an emphasis on accelerated learning techniques, and “hacking learning.” Today, I was watching a webinar by Zach Evans and it impressed upon me the difference between performance and creation. Most of what we do as programmers is based on patterns we have seen before, but not something we have practiced before.…
Over the last few years, this is a set of documentation advice I’ve come back to frequently.
On my last attempt to start a block, back in 2014, I took from some advice I had given in a Hacker News thread. It was based on some nascent ideas I had around what makes programmers bad and good. Over the last six years, I’ve kept it in the back of my head and I’ve pondered it in my spare time, doing interviews, reading what others have to say on the subject, and slowly coalesced around a handful…