Gojko Adzic

It’s not uncommon for “star” programmers to be an order of magnitude more productive than their colleagues. I believe that a large part of that productivity gap comes not from doing tasks faster, but from not doing them at all. Good programmers make the machine sweat instead. Continue Reading »

From /dev/coffee to modeling transaction processing based on Starbucks shops, the world of coffee has often inspired programmers. Here is a not so bright example from the world of coffee, giving us a hint how problems should not be solved. We recently bought a new coffee machine, and after a glance at the user manual, I was amazed to find out that our new Gaggia was affected with a common flaw of enterprise software: ignoring “stupid” problems.
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A lot of ideas in modern software development come from Zero Quality Control, Toyota’s approach to achieving product quality. Some things, it seems, have been a bit lost in translation. Here’s what ZQC can teach us about how to write better software.

Zero Quality Control takes it’s name from the idea that quality does not come from controlling and sorting out defects on the end, but from building it up front. In the words of Philip Crosby, ‘Quality has to be caused, not controlled’. Toyota’s solution consists of a design approach that aims to create mistake-proof products, early warnings and inexpensive successive tests at the source.
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The adoption of reflection into main-stream programming tools and languages over the last six or seven years gave developers almost telepathic powers, allowing us to instantly understand any object without having to read through 200 pages of boring manuals. Code insight, instellisense, class browser, or whatever the feature is called in your favourite IDE, started as a helpful utility but has now almost completely replaced API documentation. Most developers simply do not read supporting documents at all any more. Continue Reading »

Leaving behind the traditional ‘request-wait-reload page‘ processing, Web 2.0 broke many boundaries and brought online applications and sites much closer to an interactive desktop, but best practices from the desktop model have still to penetrate into the mind of common Web 2.0 developer. The paradigm shift from server-side to client-side workflow created a void in best practices for Web development. Like any new cool and funky technology, Web 2.0 has many nice new features, but comes with a set of new problems, at least new in the area of client-side browser development. Plainly ignoring these issues may cause big problems from support to serious security exploits – but there is no need to re-invent the wheel. Most of those problems were solved on the desktop a long time ago.

Here are some common mistakes with Ajax web sites, and how to avoid them. Continue Reading »