Feb
25
2008
Last week, at the London .NET User Group meeting, Ian Cooper talked about Test-driven development, focusing on both good and bad practices. I’m a big fan of learning from anti-patterns and mistakes of other people, so the second part of his session was very interesting to me. Here is a short list of things that Ian identified as symptoms that TDD has gone bad in a project, along with my comments: Continue Reading »
Jan
30
2008
I am getting more convinced every day that communication is, in fact, what makes or breaks software projects. Programming tools, practices and methods are definitely important, but if the communication fails then the rest is just painting the corpse. From that point of view, getting the language right is one of the key steps for any software project, because the language provides the foundations for all communication. The right language does not, of course, guarantee that the correct thing will be built on time and within budget — but the wrong language is practically a guarantee that the project will fail. Continue Reading »
Aug
21
2007
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 »