About a year ago I hit a patch where I wasn’t able to blog much (something about finding a new job and planning to move cross country). To bide time, I published Best of the Shade Tree Developer (with actual links!). We’re starting to pull together kind of a “Greatest Blog Hits” for a cheap way to jumpstart the ALT.NET knowledge base. Just to get some of my stuff pulled together for that effort, here’s what I think is my best posts from the last 15 months or so.
Don’t worry guys, I won’t put all of this stuff up on the new ALT.NET sites.
On Software Teams
I’ve been in a lot of spots over the last year where the element of decent teamwork wasn’t quite what it should be. I spent some time at DevTeach last spring hanging out with Rob Daigneau. One of the things he kept saying was that “it’s always a people problem.” I think I know what he means now. You’ve got to put people in a position to succeed. Here’s my take on teamwork over a dozen or so posts.
Developer/Tester colocation, what a novel concept - Of course, I’d settle for just having testers these days- The Will to be Good
- A Rant about the Software Lifecycle – We’re all iterative or we’re not iterative
- The Anti Team - the worst possible team
- Once Upon a Team - my ideal team
- Self Organizing Teams are Superior to Command n’ Control Teams
- On Process and Practices
- Retrospectives
- On Software Teams
- Call me a Utopian, but I want my teams flat and my team members broad
- Strength at the Point of Attack
Maintainability
Creating a Maintainable Software Ecosystem - This is going to be the core of one of my DevTeach talks in November- My Programming Manifesto
- Composed Method Pattern – Some readers said this was just common sense. It’d be nice if it were a bit more common.
- On Writing Maintainable Code
- Orthogonal Code
- What about Usability?
- The Anti Team
- Maintainability is “ility” #1
- The Don’t Repeat Yourself Principle and the Wormhole Anti-Pattern
- The Road to Coding Hell is paved with Cobblestones of Expediency
- Designing for Testability
- Put Code Where You Would Expect to Find It
Agile Stuff
- My Gameplan for Starting a New Project from Scratch – This is getting an overhaul around the first of the year
- New Client, New Project – What do you want to know? – Take #2
- A Rant about the Software Lifecycle – We’re all iterative or we’re not iterative
- Noah, I want you to build an Ark – Vague user stories can’t be estimated accurately
- Prioritizing by Technical Risk versus Business Value
- Trying to answer hard questions about Agile development
Other Stuff
- Don’t Let the Database Dictate Your Object Model
- Dispassionately Disregard Sunk Costs while Making Architectural Decisions
- Jay’s TDD QuickStart, and the underlying problems he stumbled into
- Jeremy’s Fourth Law of Test Driven Development: Keep Your Tail Short
- Bloom’s Taxonomy and Design Patterns
- Removing the “Legacy” from your Code - Cleaning up legacy code and retrofitting tests in
- The Build Your Own CAB Series Table of Contents – This took up most of my blog over this past spring and summer. Easily the most popular blog series I’ve ever done.
- What I’ve already done to be a better developer
- Dependency Injection Tools still have some good years left…
