Including today, there are six business days remaining in 2013 (five if you are lucky enough to get New Year’s Eve off). My brother used to call this week “the lost week” – there’s hardly anything to get done because so many people are on vacation or preoccupied with setting goals for the new year. But the downtime provides a perfect opportunity for the aspiring software developer to do the one thing they are always told there’s no time to do: make the code better for better’s sake.
With few deadlines and plenty of free time, most developers can get a few hours of refactoring in to their code towards the end of the year. They can rearchitect sections that were implemented with haste in September; they can write tests for sections that were untested in April. Put another way, the “lost week” can be redeemed.
Friday, December 21st, 2012 @ 7:00 am |
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Categories: Object-Oriented Development, Best Practices, Friday Inspirations
Tags: refactoring, object-oriented, object oriented programming, software development, Christmas, last week of the year, PHP
Maybe you struggle with object oriented code, understanding it and writing it. Perhaps you’re tired of having to rewrite code that doesn’t pass code review or introduces a bug you didn’t expect. Maybe you’d like to impress your boss by improving your skills without having to attend an expensive conference.
If any of that describes you, then I have good news: Do This, Not That: Object Oriented PHP is almost here! I’m launching it tomorrow to subscribers to my mailing list, and then on Wednesday to the general public. But here’s the catch: I’m offering a special 20% off launch day deal and it’s only available to people who are members of the launch list!
Monday, December 17th, 2012 @ 7:00 am |
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Categories: Object-Oriented Development, Best Practices, PHP 5
Tags: object-oriented, software development, book, education, do this not that, object oriented php, PHP, book writing, Learning
Years ago, I worked for a company that had a strictly governed bug fixing process. The bugs to be fixed per release were specifically regimented, right down to the amount of hours available to fix each issue. Developers were expected to meet or beat their estimates, and failing to do so meant overtime (since the deadline was immutable). With effectively every working moment spoken for, there was never any free time for innovation, invention or creativity (at least on the schedule). Developers were effectively bug fixing or feature building machines, with no input into the process or product features.
Unfortunately, this seems to be an all too common trend in the development industry. Employers, who love the ability to measure things, disdain the fact that engineering is first and foremost a creative art, that cannot be effectively measured. They attempt to install artificial measures of productivity like tests written, lines of code added, bugs solved, and number of bugs reopened by the quality assurance team. Sadly, these measures all fail to effectively measure the effectiveness of development teams, because the developers themselves see immediately through the schemes, and learn quickly to game the system.
Friday, December 14th, 2012 @ 7:00 am |
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Categories: Employment, Friday Inspirations, Technology
Tags: engineer, leadership, Employment, boss, supervisor, employer, practices, software development, development practices, engineering, engineering innovation, creativity, innovation, invention, development
Leaders of the open source community are always trying to encourage others to contribute. Volunteer contributors are always in short supply, and most open source projects are driven by volunteers, so recruitment is a big component of any open source project lead. Elizabeth Naramore put together a great list of reasons why people tend to shy away from contributing and did a great job highlighting some solutions. I want to add my own voice and experience about one of the truisms of open source development:
When it comes to making open source easier, architecture matters.
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 @ 7:00 am |
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Categories: Community, Open Source, Technology
Tags: Community, Open Source, OSS, contributing, Phergie, software development