The Nomadic DeveloperYou have heard this one before. They key to project success is “Upper Management Support”. I hear the phrase so much it is pretty much a cliche, right up there with “be aligned with the business”. It ranks right up there with “brush your teeth in the morning” and “exercise if you want to be [...]
Imagine you have a need to take one type, which may or may not be a discriminated union, and see if it “fits” inside of another type. A typical case might be whether one discriminated union case would be a possible case for a different discriminated union. That is, could the structure of type A [...]
In thinking about what is so compelling about certain new technologies that have emerged in recent years, a common theme is starting to emerge. The best technologies don’t just do something useful, but they make the user think about the right things that lead to better designs and more robust software. Lets start by thinking [...]
In 2003, Harvard Business Review published Nick Carr’s seminal essay, “IT Doesn’t Matter.” I remember that month well. The previous years of the PC boom, followed by the dotcom boom, had seen a tidal wave of money spent on technology. Much money was wasted on heavy investment in systems that either sat unused on a [...]
When we spend 80% of a development budget just keeping software that we already presumably “own” working and current, we know that technical debt is extracting a terrible toll on our budget. When making a simple program change requires effort measured in weeks rather than days, something has gone horribly wrong. In many circles, the [...]
There is this guy, Bradford Cross, whom I met on my first project at ThoughtWorks. I remember the day in a profound way, as I was on my first day at a client that, you could say, was something of a well known company in the top tier of accounting firms. The kind of place [...]
It has been a long run, but after working in the following cities over the past 37 weeks: 10 weeks in Seattle 1 week in Los Angeles 1 week in Las Vegas 12 weeks in San Jose 6 weeks in Beijing 1 week in Orlando 3 weeks in San Francisco 3 weekends in places like [...]
Yes, I decided to make “Enron” into a verb in my latest InformIT article on technical debt titled “Don’t Enron Your Software Project”. The idea is quite simple – if you are hiding technical debt rather than disclosing it to the project sponsor at the time of turnover of version 1, you are really doing [...]
Sorry for lack of posting, but true to my moniker as a “Nomadic Developer”, I have been in China off and on (mostly on) for 5 weeks, working with a team on a project that we are doing at our ThoughtWorks office in Beijing. Some thoughts so far. The first thought is how awestruck I [...]
The first article in my series about technical debt is up at InformIT, covering the concept of “Scrummerfall”, the insidious mixing of Scrum and Waterfall so you can pretend to be agile, but sadly, end up with simply a mess. In the article, I introduce the persona of the “Hubricist”. The Hubricist is the inner [...]
