Brad Wilson mentioned on the TDD mailing list (yes, those were a thing back in the day!) that the waste and inefficiency within the software industry was akin to the house building industry. I’m sure in some respects he is right, but in a more fundamental way I disagree. An…

Repost from 2010 — it sparked a lot of debate back then, and I am sure it is just as controversial now! CQRS has become another casualty of the buzzword culture and the cult of ‘shiny things’ What started as a collection of some reasonably good principles has now turned…

TLDR — If you do not have a really good use case for a global state manager in your SPA, you absolutely should avoid them like your app depended upon it Also TLDR, pretty much none of this applies to local state (i.e. useState() in React) In the React world…

The Tao of Domain-Driven Design Tao is often referred to as ‘the nameless’, because neither it nor its principles can ever be adequately expressed in words. It is conceived, for example, with neither shape nor form, as simultaneously perfectly still and constantly moving, as both larger than the largest thing and smaller than the smallest…

Industry experience suggests that the design of metrics will encourage certain kinds of behaviour from the people being measured. The common phrase applied is “you get what you measure” (or “be careful what you wish for”). A Brief Explanation of Cyclomatic Complexity and Code Coverage Cyclomatic complexity is a measure of the number of possible paths through a piece…

I’ll start by quoting Brooks Law, as no doubt you expect me to: Brooks’s law is a principle in software development which says that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”. It was coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month The truth of…

Code quality is an abstract concept again, and can be defined may ways depending on how you perceive quality. A good discussion of the many aspects of code quality can be found on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_quality Some general high level objectives for software quality could be considered to be: Conformance…

From the beginning of my current project (13 years ago now, ignore the outdated tech components in this post!) …

Recently (13 years ago now!) I joined a new project, and within reason, and excluding some legacy systems we have to talk to, we have the “luxury” of an almost greenfield project. Probably as greenfield as you realistically get anyway. I was brought in partially as a good old fashioned…