Tag: methodologies

  • The Agile Manifesto

    I started with a brief history of Agile and now I’ll look in more detail at the big one the Agile Manifesto. My initial comments were that this was a process rather than a rulebook and it would need to involve the right set of people. The Agile Manifesto They have values: And some principles:…

  • Design Patterns

    Reviewing Game Programming Patterns inspired me to read the classic Design Patterns, Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. My guess going in was that it would be more complete but not as nice to read, that’s pretty much how it was. However there were some unique patterns in each book so, if you like patterns, it…

  • A brief history of Agile

    To deal with endless change the industry seems to have settled on Agile software development. However the original definition of Agile coming from the Agile Manifesto in 2001 hasn’t really survived. All these techniques call themselves agile but often it’s just a popular label rather than something deeper. Dealing with change is not new and…

  • Time complexity

    If you’ve had a university education in software engineering you have probably come across algorithmic time complexity. This classifies algorithms by how long they take to run given an known amount of input, normally written using big O notation. Picking an algorithm with a good time complexity can make an enormous difference to the performance…

  • Game Programming Patterns

    I wanted to cleanse my palette and decided to read Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom. I’ve read it before so I knew what to expect. It’s a clearly written pattern book with simple example situation taken from the games industry. Don’t expect to get all the patterns here or advanced game programming knowledge. However…

  • Clean Code

    I’ve heard of some people following the Clean Code methodology and some people reacting against it. It’s not been on my reading list before so I got hold of Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. I think it has some good ideas and a few bad ideas. My biggest problem is that these are often…

  • Building to throw away

    A lot of my advice here will encourage a methodical approach. I’ve worked on code that is more than a decade old. In that sort of situation the original author has probably moved on, perhaps most people who were working on the team at the time. Having comments and commit messages that explain what the…

  • No comment code

    My last post mentioned No Comment Code and my initial horror at the idea. I’d not come across it directly before last year. However I think I’ve seen it’s influence on some other developers. I’ve done a bit of research but will be using Don’t Write Comments and To Comment or Not to Comment as…

  • Being explicit

    Last year I watched a YouTube video about “no comment code” which, to me, sounded like a terrible idea. A quick web search shows that not commenting code has it’s proponents. Let’s not get into that right now. While I didn’t agree with the video as a whole I did like one specific idea: Use…