Coding Philosophy Archives

Fixing Legacy Code: Missing The Forest For The Trees

Your code is a reflection of you. It gives you a mirror into your organization. You should use that to find opportunities for improvement.

It’s difficult for a 30 year old book about programming to remain relevant, but parts of this book could easily have been written today.

In “Why Employees Are Always a Bad Idea”, Chuck Blakeman lays out 7 fundamental assumptions about training. Let’s elaborate on them.

Writing code as as much about communicating with our colleagues as it is about telling the computer what to do.

Start with the simplest thing that could possibly work and only add complication as you need it. Great software is elegant in its simplicity.

Simply changing our choice of words can change the way we think. Try taking the word “but” and replacing it with the word “and”.

There are many different design philosophies, but they all must respond to change. Refactoring allows us to not get it right the first time.

I have been a programmer for 15 years and a rock climber for 20. Both have seen a surge in popularity in recent years.

We spend a lot of time on incremental learning, building on what we already know, but to see large gains we have to the change our thinking.

We often think of software development as technical, but it has a human side. We have coorkers and users to interact with and think about.