Deliberately Ugly Names
There is a humorously devilish piece of satire by Andy Yurisich that “instructs” us to give variables names like ínt, god, and LancelotsFavouriteColor – all in the pursuit of job security through inscrutable code. It’s brilliantly creative writing and I encourage you to read it; as a parody piece and not as an instruction manual....
Unit Tests
How would you define Unit Tests? That’s not a rhetorical question: I am asking (and perhaps challenging) you to come up with a crisp definition of a Unit Test. A definition that is short, is not circular, and does not need to refer to a specific programming language or...
Give me some space
My colleagues Aly Nielson and Ante Grgić recently worked on a part of a web application that required trimming strings. Their interesting and anomalous findings prompted me to write this. Quick defintions: a “string” is an array of zero or more characters. A “character” represents one symbol that has...
Inclusivity
Today (September 20th, 2019) I attended and presented at an Agile Conference in Portland, Oregon. My experience was overwhelmingly positive and enriching. I thank the organizers, hosts, sponsors, and volunteers for putting together a value-laden day of conversations and presentations. However, not everything was as it should be. In...
Cloud sprawl
Cheap and ubiquitous cloud services have begotten a sprawl of previously unimagined proportions.
So what can organizations do? While there are no trivial or silver-bullet solutions, there are several things that can improve the situation....