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Chiron Codex: helping software engineers become centaurs. APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
Category Archives: software-engineering
More speed, lower velocity
I frequently meet software teams who describe themselves as “high velocity”, they even have graphs coming from Jira to prove it, and yet their ability to ship great software, to delight their customers, or even to attract their customers, doesn’t … Continue reading
Posted in Business, performance, process, software-engineering
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Coming to terms with fewer terms
I was on a “Leadership in Architecture” panel organised by RP International recently, and was asked about problems we face using new techniques like Microservices, serverless and machine learning in the financial technology sector. The biggest blocker I see is … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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What’s better than semver?
Many software libraries are released with version “numbers” that follow a scheme called Semantic Versioning. A semantic version is three numbers separated by dots, of the form x.y.z, where: if x is zero, all bets are off. Otherwise; z increments … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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To become a beginner, first become an expert
We have a whole load of practices in programming that only really work well if you’re already good at whatever the process is supposed to help with. Scrum is a process improvement framework, but only if you already know how … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, software-engineering, TDD, tool-support
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Reasoning about reasoning about software
Functional programmers like to claim that you can’t reason about mutable state programs. Some thoughts: the first half of the book A Discipline of Programming by Edsger W. Dijkstra tells you how to do it. That half of the book … Continue reading
The Atoms of Programming
In the world of physics, there are many different models that can be used, though typically each of them has different applicability to different contexts. At the small scale, quantum physics is a very useful model, Newtonian physics will yield … Continue reading
In which new developer tools are dull
Over on lobste.rs I said that I don’t hold out much hope for another “blue plane” style event in developer tools. In one of Alan Kay’s presentations, he referred to the ordinary way of things as the pink plane, and … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering, tool-support
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Technical debt and jury service
We have the idea that in addition to the product development backlogs for our teams, there’s an engineering backlog where technical debt paydown, process/tooling improvements, and other sitewide engineering concerns get recorded. Working on them is done in time that … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering
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Literate Programming with LibreOffice
This post comes in the form of an OpenDocumentFormat document containing a program that can extract programs from ODF documents, including the program contained in this document.
Posted in code-level, software-engineering, tool-support
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I just want to point out that even the best of us aren’t doing what we expect the makers of acne creams to do. What we actually know about software development, and why we believe it’s true by Greg Wilson.
