Hi, my name is Gordon Cassie. I am a corporate lawyer turned software developer. In 2013, I founded Closing Folders with a friend from law school. Our mi...
Modern software businesses are the closest thing you will find to a money tree. Every month they grow an ever increasing amount of cash. You don't even need to pick the cash off the tree, you can just hook it up to your bank account and watch it fill up continuously. When these money trees are well engineered, the minimum cost to keep them growing is just a tiny fraction of what they produce. With…
One day, when Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet were all talking together, Christopher Robin finished the mouthful he was eating and said carelessly: "I saw a Heffalump to-day, Piglet." "What was it doing?" asked Piglet. "Just lumping along," said Christopher Robin. "I don't think it saw me." "I saw one once," said Piglet. "At least, I think I did," he said. "Only perhaps it…
Most software is made by teams of developers working together. These teams can function at different levels. Some very small teams have created extremely impressive pieces of software while some extremely large teams have failed to produce almost anything of value after years of work. We could situate every software development team on a spectrum of how well it performs with the extremes of the…
Last week in Vancouver, Software You Can Love 2023 brought together programmers from across the world working on software applications ranging from national defence systems to power plants to decentralized media ownership. There was even a dev who works on robots that make cakes. While the talks were prepared in isolation by each speaker, certain themes seemed to be woven through the two days of…
We are building a house for our customers to live in. Not just a house, but a palatial mansion. We are building it to the highest possible standard. Every last detail must be perfect. When the customers walk through the front door, every square inch should sparkle. To accomplish this, each of us must obsess over the quality of the house. No single person can go through the house day-by-day…
Businesses have stakeholders. People often think about these stakeholders in broad groups such as employees, customers and investors, but there is actually a lot of diversity within each of these. For example, employees perform vastly different functions. They can be organized into different teams and departments with distinct objectives. Their levels of experience can change their behaviour and…
Well, that was unexpected. My last post (which was also my first post - ignoring an article from last year I put on here to make it look like I hadn't only written one post), blew up on HackerNews and got over 450 comments. One week later, I've had over 40,000 unique reads on it. Absolutely mind blowing stuff. The discussion was really great actually. Even the haters were pretty reasonable and…
I figured I'd kick off my new blog with the most click baity thing I could think of. I suspect any developer reading this is aware of the DRY principle because it is just so ubiquitous. If not though, you just need to know that it stands for "Don't Repeat Yourself" and is generally invoked when advising people to not copy and paste snippets of code all over the place and instead consolidate logic…
In 2019, we had been actively working on our Django application for over 5 years and it was starting to show. The tales I had heard of successful software companies becoming bogged down in technical debt to the point of crisis were beginning to sound far more plausible to me. As a result, we began a quest to figure out how we could evolve our development practices to enable a sustained high rate…