It’s one of the biggest questions in software development: why on earth does it take so many people so long to get something done? This is particularly true for large organizations with dozens or hundreds of teams trying to work together to deliver software. I’m going to summarize what I’ve…

I recently posted a video explaining the cost of delay This is such an important topic. We all know the cost of delays when it comes to web requests — if a site takes too long to load, you’re going to lose customers. …

One of the things that happens as you become a senior developer is you start mentoring younger engineers. And a common topic I hear is frustration with performance reviews and promotions (or lack thereof). The pattern I see is engineers get comments on their reviews which are unclear or confusing…

A question came in over the wire today about how one might apply the SOLID principles to services when they were originally intended to be about class design. This actually a very interesting topic. I have noticed that as microservices have taken hold, many engineers are finding that object-oriented languages…

Hey, all. I created a short video talking about how to use acceptance criteria to avoid confusion and rework, a common problem I hear from developers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfvcpNtVgkY

You’re driving smoothly down the freeway, and suddenly, you’re in stop-and-go traffic. After half an hour, you creep by an accident on the other side of the freeway. Just from people slowing down to see what’s going on, your direction has jammed up. …

I grew up in Colorado, where the roads get dangerously icy during the winter. When you hit an icy patch and your car starts losing control, your immediate instinctive reaction is to slam on the brakes. But it turns out that is exactly the opposite of what you should do…

Verbatim from my Pa (Dr. John Van Couvering, geologist and all-around Scientist), who wrote this up for a his local neighborhood newsletter in upstate New York Most of us have heard of the great extinction that wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the earth. Of course this didn’t really…

Traditionally we have been taught that we should strive for high coverage on unit tests, and build some integration tests for end-to-end flows. I’d like to refine that a little bit in this article on testing principles and strategy. Principles of Testing There are some key principles that drive the way I think…