Do you like bananas? I do – sort of. It’s more precise to say I like banana. That is, one banana, not multiple. I suspect many people are like me. We enjoy eating a banana, very few eat two bananas in a row, no-one in the history of mankind has ever eaten three. To really […]
I worry about the wasted effort, the distraction and the opportunity cost brought on by the massive AI hype wave sweeping over society. Instead of solving real problems with known solutions, we dance around to the tune of the trend goblins like so many string puppets. It’s like we’re all participating in a massively distributed […]
It’s pretty cute that self-help people have discovered exponential functions. Just improve 1% every day, and you will have improved almost 38-fold by the end of the year! Because you see, 1.01^365 is 37.78. Wow! So inspirational! But what does it mean? What does it mean for me to improve 1%? What is it that […]
Kent Beck recently published a blog post called “Friction >> Debt”, where he suggests that the “technical debt” metaphor has outlived its usefulness and suggests “friction” as a replacement. The problem, according to Beck, is that “the business folks” are prone to interpret “technical debt” as a weak excuse for wanting to spend time fixing […]
This is a transcript of a talk I did at Booster 2023 in Bergen. Here’s a scene. Imagine we’re having a stand-up meeting. A stand-up meeting, as you will be aware, is a ritual where a team of software developers stands in a circle in the hope of summoning the spirit known as agility. If […]
A fundamental challenge we face as programmers is that the world is alive, but the programs we write, alas, are not. When we deploy our dead programs to operate in the living world, it presents an immediate maintenance problem. Or, if you like, a matter of keeping up appearances. In the movie Night on Earth, […]
A year ago I was reading the CfP for HAPOP 2020, the 5th symposium on the History and Philosophy of Programming, and there it was again, the quasi-philosophical question that keeps haunting our industry. In fact, it was listed as the very first question in a long list of potential questions of relevance for the […]
I read this tweet today: I’ve seen variations of that statement many times over the years. It’s a statement that resonnates with many people. It’s easy to see why. After all, we’re not mere programmers. We do lots of things. And yet I find myself going in the opposite direction. I am increasingly referring to […]
Is there anything interesting happening at the intersection between Conway’s law and mob programming? Yes! What? Read on! As you may know, the term “Conway’s law” comes from a 1968 paper by Mel Conway called “How do committes invent?“. If you haven’t already, I really recommend taking the time to read the paper. It’s just […]
I recently re-read the “Out of the Tar Pit” paper by Ben Moseley and Peter Marks for a Papers We Love session at work. It is a pretty famous paper. You can find it at the Papers We Love repository at GitHub for the simple reason that lots of people love it. Reading the paper […]
I recently wrote a blog post where I argued that “JSON serialization” as commonly practiced in the software industry is much too ambitious. This is the case at least in the .NET and Java ecosystems. I can’t really speak to the state of affairs in other ecosystems, although I note that the amount of human […]