Monthly Archives: April 2015

A kata above

The code kata is a method software craftspeople use to practice their craft. The idea is that you take a problem you understand, like FizzBuzz or Conway’s Life, and build an application that implements it. Then build another one. And … Continue reading

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In The Design of Design, Fred Brooks makes an interesting point about ESR’s description of the Bazaar model of Linux (and, by extension, “Open Source”) development. Linux was actually designed in a cathedral. The design was supplied by Unix, where … Continue reading

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An acceptable tool It’s easy to forget that adequacy is, well, adequate. It’s easy to go all-in on making some code structure perfect, when good enough would be good enough.

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Beware the IDEs

I recently had the opportunity to talk with a couple of software project managers from IBM. That company is of a kind that I have never worked at, and many of the companies I have worked at are of kinds … Continue reading

Posted in tool-support | 2 Comments

Hiding behind messages

A problem I think about every so often is how to combine the software design practice of hiding implementations behind interfaces with the engineering practice of parallel execution. What are the trade-offs between making parallelism explicit and information hiding? Where … Continue reading

Posted in architecture of sorts, code-level, OOP | 4 Comments