When people look at what they want to call Legacy Code, they don’t see a coherent system. They see an implementation that they can’t read. They see a design that is not simple/elegant enough. They see a pile of patches instead of a clean architecture. They wonder how any competent programmer could have made such… Read More »
One of my managers many years ago was in a meeting where someone from sales was disparaging our legacy code and he made a comment that has stayed with me for decades: “Legacy? Oh you mean the code that pays our paychecks?” The legacy system pays our paychecks Most code that hangs around long enough… Read More »
Most companies with a software development staff have legacy code that they need to maintain because it runs their business. Even companies that don’t do software as their main business may have internal tools and such that they need to maintain. Many software developers and even product and management would prefer to have new, shiny… Read More »
I have heard this comment in almost every company where I have worked. Without fail, this response occurs when someone on the technical staff suggests adding a practice accepted in other parts of the industry. Some variations are Early in my career, it was used to justify not using version control (yeah, I’ve been at… Read More »
Several years ago I gave a talk at work with the same title as this post. For a while, recordings of these lunch talks were available internally in the company. Over several years, I’ve had people either thank me for the original talk or reference things I said in the talk. Despite the fact that… 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 »
In my last post, I talked about a quick little project that has grown into experimenting with several new tools/processes. I finally got a reasonable release out on CPAN as SVG::Sparkline version 0.30. This version supports 6 different sparkline types: Area, Bar, Line, RangeArea, RangeBar, and Whisker. It also has better documentation in the form… Read More »
For various reasons, I’ve recently been thinking on the importance of programming play, Those times when we tinker with code without any goal other than making something run on the computer. Sometimes this involves playing with a new language or a feature of an old language that we’ve recently discovered. Unlike projects for work, these… Read More »
I just recently read Valueless Software, written by Chad Fowler from about a year ago. In this article, he describes an approach to practicing music by ignoring the result and focusing on the process. He contends that software people might benefit from a similar approach. I have actually seen this approach used before in C… Read More »
Reading Dave Thomas’s blog on Code Kata pointed to PragDave: MoreKata. I also stumbled across How To Practice on Chad Fowler’s blog. Both of these entries discuss exercises that we can use to master the art of programming. Perhaps surprisingly, they use metaphors and concepts from martial arts and Zen. Those of us who have… Read More »