Archives

I was looking at some code the other day and noticed that it had a line like this:

@product.first.price

And I cringed. Not because I knew it was wrong (it wasn’t). But because using “.first” feels like a code smell. (I should note that this…

I work with entrepreneurs. They – like many of us – want things fast, want things great, and want things cheap. That darn iron triangle keeps getting in the way, though.

You can change the shape of the triangle, but you can’t grow it. The secret th…

I do a lot of my development using web technologies. Much of my code winds up running in a browser (or driving something that runs in a browser). Most of the time, the browser is just a convenient delivery mechanism. I write a few lines of code, and th…

I’m working on a system right now that interfaces with a third party system. That third party system is an aggregator, which means it interfaces with a number of other third party systems. You can think of it as a giant game of telephone.

Unfortunat…

I was reminded this morning that user interfaces aren’t just about being pretty or looking good. They’re about putting the right information in front of the user at the right time. Good user interfaces are also about helping users understand the m…

I’m a manager. My job basically consists of getting other people to do things. Preferably they’ll do the right things with reasonable timing. There are about a zillion ways to accomplish this, and I’m not going to get into too much detail about ma…

There are some problem reports that are guaranteed to strike fear into the hearts of developers, testers, and support engineers alike. The top one of these:

“It’s sluggish.”

(Don’t panic don’t run away don’t toss an innocent bystander in front of …

Yesterday I was giving a talk for the STP online summit for Test Management. My talk was on getting your testing MBA and it was basically about how testers can and should consider the needs of the business, in order to work more effectively with busine…

Many of us software engineers work somewhat in isolation. Yes, most of us are on teams and yes, most of us are working in the same code base as other engineers. However, code bases contain thousands of lines of code, with dozens or hundreds of modules …

I’m sitting in a co-working facility and listening to a couple of engineers behind me. They seem to be working on an application in Rails that involves doing role-based security. I’m not sure exactly what the application does, but they keep saying thin…