As you probably know, code is read more often than it is written. Anybody who has worked on code written by anyone else has probably wished that the code were more readable at some point. Writing readable code should definitely be considered a best practice. The problem comes when defining what you mean by readable.… Read More »
One of the design ideas that came out of the early days of the agile movement was YAGNI. As I have written before, this idea is push back against the tendency of many programmers to over-engineer or over-complicate our designs. We normally use some variation of the flexibility argument to justify this tendency. In fact,… Read More »
For the next entry in the Best Practices Gone Bad series of posts, I have a topic I wish I had thought of. In issue 125 of Overload magazine (Feb 2015), Sergey Ignatchenko wrote an article entitled Best Practices vs Witch Hunts. Sergey covers a somewhat different approach to how best practices go bad. He… Read More »
The past few generations of version control systems have really good support for branching. This feature allows someone to create a new line of development that is separate from the official main/master/trunk line of development. Changes made on a branch do not affect the main development until they are merged to the main branch. Shortly… Read More »
Despite the press in recent years asserting the software development is always a team activity, there are still individual programmers building software without help from others. I’ve recently had a question from one such individual asking if version control makes sense for a developer working alone. Despite working in teams for years, I also work… Read More »
One of the classic mistakes of software development results from thinking we know what we are doing. Entirely too many people in software start off each project believing they know enough about the project to lay out the whole design. Except in the rare circumstance that you are building an exact copy of something you… Read More »
It is written We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. —Donald Knuth Most people forget the very next thing he said: Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%. Many developers have lost the original meaning of premature… Read More »
In some environments where I’ve worked, new features were being added and bugs were being fixed up until the very moment that the code was released. This obviously leads to problems where one change generates new bugs that we have not yet had time to find, much less fix. Consequently, another buggy release goes out… Read More »
As I’m writing this in December of 2014, I’ve been reminded that the classic Design Patterns book came out in 1995, almost twenty years ago. I didn’t see the book until a year or two later. Reactions I remember several reactions from the programmers I was working with at the time. Most of the programmers… Read More »
In a recent blog post, I suggested that the most important result of a developer writing code is the understanding of the problem/solution. Most of the reason for suggesting this change in focus is to help people understand that throwing away code that no longer serves a purpose is a good thing, not a loss.… Read More »