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 »
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 »
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 »
I recently been studying software architecture and have had a minor epiphany. My assumptions about code complexity may have been unnecessarily pessimistic. From my experiences in software development, I have observed that more powerful or more robust systems are naturally more complex. A side effect of this observation is that beginning to do development on… Read More »
I was reading The JavaScript Phrasebook on Safari and ran across one of my favorite pet peeves when people write about Web technologies. Cookies are not a specific browser technology, but a mechanism in the client/server model to overcome one major shortcoming in the HTTP protocol. HTTP is stateless, which means that the protocol does… Read More »
Continuing the line of thought from last time (Sharp Tools vs. Frameworks), another issue I see in quite a few frameworks and some systems is a code anti-pattern I’ll call The Modular Monolith. We all know that modularity is a good thing to have in a system. Modular code, in general, reduces coupling between components,… Read More »