Kindness and Code
It is very easy to think of software development as being an entirely technical activity, where humans don’t really matter and everything is about the computer. However, the opposite is actually true.…
The Fundamental Philosophy of Debugging
Sometimes people have a very hard time debugging. Mostly, these are people who believe that in order to debug a system, you have to think about it instead of looking at it.…
Refactoring is About Features
There’s a point that I made in the book but which I have had to point out to people a few times since then, and so I wanted to emphasize it a…
Effective Engineering Productivity
Often, people who work on engineering productivity either come into conflict with the developers they are attempting to help, or spend a long time working on some project that ends up not…
Measuring Developer Productivity
Almost as long as I have been working to make the lives of software engineers better, people have been asking me how to measure developer productivity. How do we tell where there…
How to Handle Code Complexity in a Software Company
Here’s an obvious statement that has some subtle consequences: Only an individual programmer can resolve code complexity. That is, resolving code complexity requires the attention of an individual person on that code.…
The Purpose of Technology
In general, when technology attempts to solve problems of matter, energy, space, or time, it is successful. When it attempts to solve human problems of the mind, communication, ability, etc. it fails…
The Secret of Fast Programming: Stop Thinking
When I talk to developers about code complexity, they often say that they want to write simple code, but deadline pressure or underlying issues mean that they just don’t have the time…
Make It Never Come Back
When solving a problem in a codebase, you’re not done when the symptoms stop. You’re done when the problem has disappeared and will never come back. It’s very easy to stop solving…
The Philosophy of Testing
Much like we gain knowledge about the behavior of the physical universe via the scientific method, we gain knowledge about the behavior of our software via a system of assertion, observation, and…