Agile, General

“just add an if”

You’re talking about a new feature that’s being planned and prioritized to the dev-team. It’s straight-forward enough, but you sense that it’s latching on yet another feature to an existing long chain of functionality. The team has some reservations to expanding the feature chain even more before doing some adjustments to how it’s been architected to keep this maintainable. That’s when you hear from the product owner: “Just add an if…”. Continue Reading

Craftsmanship

Capturing Intent – Making sense of code

Picture the scenario: You are staring at the computer screen and scanning the lines of code that fill it. You scratch your head and think: Why?

You debug the code, step-by-step and see a method call that sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s doing an out of process call to another subsystem before the code has completed its job in this method.

Why is that out of process call made there? There’s no documentation explaining why. Moving it to the end of the method makes more sense, but then everything breaks. WHY? 

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As a software developer, you might have experienced situations like this. You’re looking to fix a bug or extend a feature and you stumble over code that just doesn’t make sense.

You can see what it’s doing, even understand how it’s works, but you just can’t understand why.

In this post I’ll show you why making the extra effort to capture the intent of the code is so important. Continue Reading

Craftsmanship

#regions, huh! What are they good for?

I stumbled over a slightly different manifesto the other day. Or it was a legion actually. Developers taking up arms against a travesty of the C# language: #regions. You can read it at  http://anti-region-legion.org. So what is the legion all about? Here’s the message from the website:

The Anti-#region Legion is a community for people who believe that the C# #region is an unfortunate part of the language.

I  saw this and thought I was behind it completely, but decided to revisit my previous experiences and assumptions on the matter before concluding. Continue Reading

Craftsmanship, Developer growth

Pitfalls of writing software alone

The power of one

There’s nothing like being able to work on a project by yourself and having complete control of every single aspect of the solution. Everything from the front-end stack to the storage. Using the latest and greatest frameworks and libraries. This is heaven for any software developer. But regardless of any of the above technology-focused aspects, there is one major advantage being that single developer, namely: speed! But there are pitfalls when writing software alone. Continue Reading