Articles tagged “rant”

• Playing the Russian roulette with your business · the excitement of the randomness Af­ter spend­ing a few months in an or­di­nary small French soft­ware de­vel­op­ment com­pa­ny, I’m tru­ly amazed at the ef­fort which makes the whole process high­ly un­pre­dictable and in­creas­es the odds of fail­ing at every step. If work­ing for a well-or­ga­nized…
  management 34 risk 1 rant 34
• Dockyard of ships that can’t sail Bad­ly man­aged pro­jects of­ten share an el­e­ment: the will­ing­ness to de­liv­er all fea­tures in a giv­en amount of time and with­in bud­get. Giv­en how we con­cep­tu­al­ize the no­tion of a de­liv­er­able out­side IT…
  management 34 rant 34
• Closed source, secrecy and trust Most com­pa­nies which pro­duce source code don't re­lease it in the wild. They are hid­ing it, pro­tect­ing it against unau­tho­rized ac­cess, ob­fus­cate it, make you sign NDA and ask them­selves how they can be sure that the code will nev­er ever reach…
  quality 36 rant 34
• Coffee maker Take a cof­fee mak­er. What is its pur­pose? Its only pur­pose is to make cof­fee. It’s the only thing it does and knows. It has only one but­ton, and every­body know how to use it. Now take the Boe­ing 787. How many but­tons are there? How many peo­ple can…
  rant 34 short 50
• Custom search engine Many e-com­merce web­sites im­ple­ment their own search en­gine. Many do it wrong, so wrong that they lose po­ten­tial cus­tomers they won't lose if they had no search en­gine at all. Google pro­vides an easy to im­ple­ment way to search for stuff with­in Google…
  rant 34
• Aren't we misusing YAGNI too often? OK, I get it, I'm over-think­ing and over-en­gi­neer­ing this app. I should KISS, be­cause YAG­NI. Great. I should not at­tempt to solve prob­lems I don't have. I should not at­tempt to solve prob­lems I don't have. Or should I? De­vel­op­ment is filled with…
  refactoring 12 rant 34 short 50
• Written in stone On most pro­jects, a huge amount of time is spent hy­poth­e­siz­ing about sub­jects which not only don't mat­ter, but of­ten don't have a de­fin­i­tive an­swer. I of­ten see pro­gram­mers ar­gu­ing about which one of two im­ple­men­ta­tions is faster and which one will…
  short 50 rant 34 performance 13
• Did you know that Ruby is faster than C? In the past few days, there was on Pro­gram­mers.SE at least three ques­tions ([ex­am­ple][1]) which can be sum­ma­rized as: “Which pro­gram­ming lan­guage is faster, this one or that one?” This is an­noy­ing. I al­ready as­sert­ed once that it makes no sense to…
  productivity 36 rant 34 performance 13
• Stack Overflow make us lazy It is com­mon to think that the pur­pose of Stack Over­flow is to make the world bet­ter, and it does, some­how. I think that it in­creased the over­all qual­i­ty of de­vel­op­er-ori­ent­ed re­sources, pro­vid­ed a…
  rant 34 stack-exchange 4 short 50
• Teaching patterns Col­lege de­grees in IT-re­lat­ed dis­ci­plines are known for not teach­ing some cru­cial things that every de­vel­op­er should know. Many stu­dents may be proud of con­tribut­ing to dozens of pro­jects, but don't…
  productivity 36 rant 34 thoughts 6
• Naming conventions for servers The rant se­ries of this blog will be in­com­plete if I wouldn't men­tion the nam­ing con­ven­tions for servers, es­pe­cial­ly since I've nev­er even seen a con­ven­tion which would make at least some sense in any com­pa­ny. The three pre­vail­ing nam­ing con­ven­tions…
  rant 34 datacenter 4
• Why do I need to install SQL Server for a simple Hello World ASP.NET MVC website? I need­ed to cre­ate a small serv­er-side web-based ap­pli­ca­tion. The ap­pli­ca­tion is ex­treme­ly sim­ple, just a few lines of code. Host­ing provider seems to sup­port only PHP and ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC, and I picked the last one, since the ap­pli­ca­tion may…
  short 50 rant 34 user-experience 10
• Workflows Im­por­tant note: this ar­ti­cle fo­cus­es specif­i­cal­ly on Share­Point work­flows. What is writ­ten here doesn't ap­ply to Win­dows Work­flow Foun­da­tion (WF) and sim­i­lar work­flow tools, which have a per­fect­ly valid us­age and em­pow­er de­vel­op­ers with the abil­i­ty…
  rant 34 productivity 36
• Measurement: a two-edged sword Too of­ten, the prac­tice of mea­sur­ing things is used in place of ba­sic think­ing, and, log­i­cal­ly, leads to low cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion and poor prod­uct qual­i­ty. The ma­jor rea­son for that is that in most cas­es, mea­sure­ment is de­hu­man­iz­ing. A cus­tomer,…
  short 50 performance 13 quality 36 rant 34
• Packages, dependencies and interaction between teams Re­cent­ly, a ques­tion of Pro­gram­mers.SE passed un­no­ticed, be­cause of its length. This is un­for­tu­nate, be­cause the ques­tion high­lights a bunch of mis­un­der­stand­ings with­in many teams on a broad range of sub­jects, from Con­tin­u­ous In­te­gra­tion to…
  rant 34 productivity 36 management 34 communication 27
• A bug or a change? A fea­ture is de­liv­ered to a cus­tomer. The cus­tomer com­plains that some­thing doesn't be­have as ex­pect­ed and cre­ates a tick­et in a bug track­ing sys­tem. Should we clas­si­fy this tick­et as a bug or a change? The ques­tion mat­ters for many soft­ware…
  rant 34 communication 27 agile 10
• Utility classes are wrong Every­one has some­where on a PC a di­rec­to­ry called “mis­cel­la­neous”, or sim­ply “misc.” This is where we put or­phaned stuff which haven't found its place some­where else, grouped with sim­i­lar files in a well-named di­rec­to­ry. For some peo­ple, the desk­top…
  rant 34 terminology 2
• Working with the people you manage A few years ago, I worked in a com­pa­ny in Poitiers. Things went well un­til our boss left, and a new one ar­rived. The new one ap­peared to be, well, a bit proud of his new sta­tus, and, nat­u­ral­ly, de­cid­ed that he has plen­ty of im­por­tant things to do and…
  communication 27 management 34 rant 34
• Users matter more than bytes and CPU cycles There is some­thing com­plete­ly wrong in de­vel­op­ers' na­ture to be ob­sessed with per­for­mance to the detri­ment of every­thing else. It seems even that this com­pul­sive ob­ses­sion is not some­thing we ac­quire with prac­tice, since it af­fects even be­gin­ner…
  interaction-design 9 short 50 rant 34 performance 13 optimization 2
• Naming conventions for servers, two years later A few years ago, I wrote an ar­ti­cle ex­plain­ing how do I name servers. Since then, lit­tle changed, and con­ven­tions used in com­pa­nies are still in­sane. Men­tal­i­ty hasn't changed ei­ther, and it's still con­sid­ered pro­fes­sion­al to have ar­bi­trary,…
  rant 34 datacenter 4
• Ratings in a CV Heard to­day a dis­cus­sion of two col­leagues about a pos­si­ble im­prove­ment of a CV by adding for every tech­nol­o­gy a rat­ing, show­ing the mas­tery lev­el of the per­son in this par­tic­u­lar tech­nol­o­gy. I'm sor­ry about those col­leagues. They have a deep…
  rant 34 hiring 15 communication 27
• Gated checkins are evil I was re­cent­ly talk­ing with a de­vel­op­er about a pre-build strat­e­gy he wants to set up in his team which uses trunk-based de­vel­op­ment. His idea is that in or­der to pre­vent prob­lem­at­ic code from hit­ting the trunk in ver­sion con­trol, a client-side…
  productivity 36 testing 7 rant 34
• On bug tracking systems There are no good bug track­ing sys­tems, and I'm about to ex­plain what makes them not good and why good sys­tems weren't de­vel­oped yet. To be­gin, let's il­lus­trate a jour­ney of two per­sons work­ing on the same team: one of the pro­gram­mers and a prod­uct…
  rant 34 productivity 36 user-experience 10 productivity 36 management 34
• Take risks, fail fast In many soft­ware de­vel­op­ment teams, the source code is sa­cred. Its sa­cred­ness is caused by two fac­tors: The code is the ul­ti­mate ex­pres­sion of the in­tel­lec­tu­al work of the de­vel­op­ers. If you have any­thing against the code, it means that you're…
  productivity 36 quality 36 refactoring 12 rant 34 requirements 3
• Monochrome laziness Twelve years ago, Win­dows Vista was re­leased, im­press­ing every­one by its shiny, elab­o­rate icons. For in­stance, a re­cy­cle bin was il­lus­trat­ed by a shiny trans­par­ent waste bas­ket. Search func­tion­al­i­ty was shown in a form of a metal­lic mag­ni­fy­ing glass.…
  rant 34 design 2 interaction-design 9 user-experience 10 quality 36
• Unit testing methods which are calling static methods Dis­claimer: the ar­ti­cle be­low talks about meth­ods call­ing pub­lic sta­t­ic meth­ods from oth­er class­es. This ex­cludes the calls to pri­vate sta­t­ic meth­ods. Re­cent­ly, I wrote a rather un­pop­u­lar an­swer on Stack Ex­change about sta­t­ic meth­ods in a con­text of…
  rant 34 refactoring 12 unit-testing 6 design 2
• Documenting types used in services SOA and mi­croser­vices trends caused the fren­zy where every­one start­ed to ex­pose every­thing as a ser­vice. Large and small com­pa­nies want­ed to re­place big sys­tems of com­po­nents with rel­a­tive­ly un­clear in­ter­faces be­tween them by big­ger sys­tems of…
  rant 34 microservices 2 short 50
• Lazy programmer fallacy There is, among pro­ject man­agers, a think­ing that pro­gram­mers are lazy. Pro­gram­mers—they say—don't want to work; they pre­fer play­ing games or just do­ing noth­ing at all. This is all but truth. Ac­tu­al­ly, many pro­gram­mers en­joy pro­gram­ming. They have…
  rant 34 short 50 management 34 quality 36
• YAGNI principle in action Dis­cussing YAG­NI with col­leagues, I of­ten find my­self in a sit­u­a­tion where they give me a con­crete ex­am­ple where they were very hap­py to think about a giv­en fea­ture or as­pect be­fore it was re­al­ly need­ed. As those dis­cus­sions al­ways fol­low the same…
  rant 34 productivity 36 quality 36 refactoring 12 agile 10
• Build complexity I'm al­ways amazed at the ca­pac­i­ty of large and small com­pa­nies to pick the tools which would make their build as com­plex as pos­si­ble. It's like they en­joy pay­ing mon­ey for some­thing which will cost them even more mon­ey. The core prob­lem here is the…
  rant 34 productivity 36
• Designing a contact form Re­cent­ly, a col­league asked me how I would re­design a con­tact form on a web­site. An e-com­merce site he was work­ing on had a “ba­sic” (as he claimed) form where you had to pro­vide: Your full name. Your…
  rant 34 interaction-design 9
• Architecture without culture I was re­cent­ly watch­ing the Deep­Mind's Al­pha­Go doc­u­men­tary, which starts with sev­er­al views of Ox­ford, in­clud­ing a shot where half of the frame is filled with the out­side of The Shel­don­ian The­atre, the oth­er half show­ing the His­to­ry of Sci­ence…
  architecture (construction) 1 rant 34 short 50
• Hiring process is inherently wrong Reg­u­lar­ly, man­agers ask me ques­tions about the hir­ing process. All of them com­plain about three things: They have a lot of bad can­di­dates—can­di­dates who clear­ly don't qual­i­fy for the job. They have few good can­di­dates. They of­ten hire per­sons who end…
  hiring 15 rant 34
• When testing is not fun enough On reg­u­lar ba­sis, some col­league starts com­plain­ing in an in­for­mal dis­cus­sion about the low qual­i­ty of some pro­ject he's work­ing on. It has to do with code qual­i­ty, or lack of tests, or both. Every…
  testing 7 quality 36 rant 34 productivity 36