After the move to the new office is nearly complete, work begins to normalize again. Here is the February blog harvest with a little more entries, as I wasn’t unable to read other blogs, but to write on our own blog. There are many fun articles this time that I found share-worthy, perhaps because they made me laugh even in harder times.
- The “Two Minutes To Midnight” Strategy In Software Development – Adam Bien is looking for an agile asian vocable. He needs it to describe the slack waste that occurs in low-pressure phases of projects. How about “dis-focus”? Perhaps by funny pronounciation, it may sound asian, too.
- Unskilled and unaware of it – This is a lesson we all learn early: We aren’t quite as good as we think. This blog entry introduces the Dunning-Kruger effect and accompanies it with amusing stories. Everybody should be aware of the effect, at least.
- Am I too stupid for @Autowired? – Peter Veentjer talks about his objections with Spring’s automagic functionality. I tend to agree that @Autowired et.al. is fairy dust in your code. And magic should be avoided when programming.
- Is Spring still lightweight? – When talking about Spring, this question by Kief Morris is valid, too. Spring started out small and fascinating and eventually grew bigger.
- What are we going to do about the crap code ? – Chris Burnley analyzes the causes for crappy code and suggests some solutions. Our solution is to avoid crappy code at all costs. Crap4j is a great tool to help you with that on the coding level.
- The Master, The Expert, The Programmer – Zed Shaw’s plea for true mastery in programming. A long read, but an entertaining one. The recent occurrence of code katas and coding dojos directly aim in the same direction, i guess. There are even a bunch of product advertisements that wire the topics together.
- Youth, Old Age, Cancer and Technical Debt – This article takes technical debt (you might think of crappy code as instant technical debts – just add water) and relates it to the human body. This leads to the term “product cancer”, which I find quite striking.
This was the more serious part of this harvesting. Let’s read some articles that share their message in a lighter way:
- What kind of woman would your web framework be? – If you ever have to sell a new hot (web) framework to management, why not take this plausible approach? At least they could relate to what you are talking about.
- It’s Not the Recession, You Just Suck – Ouch! That hurt. This is a wake-up call for everybody who likes to blame it on higher means. And it reminds me to hurry up with this blog entry and get back to work.
- I test therefore I log bugs – Ever tried to explain “programming” to your grandparents? You’ll end in esoterics (“teaching machines to have dreams”) or in obviousnesses. This is a story about consensus on the latter.
This blog harvest closes with a video:
- Uncle Bob on Software Craftsmanship – Much of what Bob Martin says has truth in it, but for me the last two minutes are the most explicit and rewarding. By the way, Uncle Bob looks good in the T-Shirt (I always feared it would be teared, regarding the sounds when he stretches), but needs to switch his cell phone off.
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