Tag: planning
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The Checklist Manifesto
The Checklist Manifesto is a book from 2010 by author Atual Gawande, an American surgeon and public health researcher. I read it a while ago and it reinforces my belief that we all make mistakes. Unsurprisingly the book is all about checklists. It may not sound like much it can be a great help in…
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API lock-in
When C# first came out it didn’t have generics, that didn’t come out until version 2.0. That meant that, say, the user interface APIs either had to deal with collections of unknown objects or be use custom written collections. If they did one you don’t know what object you have; if you do the other…
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Iterative development
It can be useful to develop in a series of small steps. At each point trying to write the code that you need but not too much more. Building a huge library that you think you’ll need might be a waste of time but building something small that lets you simplify you current code is…
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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:…
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Learning from… fine art restoration
So I don’t practice fine art restoration myself, or indeed have much at all to do with painting, I do sometimes watch Baumgartner Restoration. It features the restoration of mostly paintings using modern materials and techniques. While the artwork is not world renowned none of it can simply be replaced. They are normally old pictures,…
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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…
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Forever change
Let’s start with a few updates about the blogs. I’m going to be busier in the coming weeks so, for now, posts will only be once a week. It might be possible to go back to twice a week once things have settled down. We’ll have to see. If you’ve been reading from the start…
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Learning from… jigsaws
Since starting this blog it has made me think about regular activities and wonder if they can teach me any lessons for writing better software. In the last couple of years jigsaws have gone from not on being my radar to a fairly regular thing. I often pick colourful, geometric or architectural one. Although there’s…
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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…
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The taste test
Imagine you’ve just been given a new cookbook. It has a recipe for Oysters Rockefeller that a friend recommended. Really it could be anything but oysters have been in my media for the last week so we’ll go with them. You buy the ingredients, prepare them carefully, cook and serve. It looks great, you take…