Observations

Posted by Jeremy Miller on March 13, 2008
  • Developers abhor a clean whiteboard
  • All code base’s want to have an ICommand abstraction of some sort
  • Sooner or later, a project called TestHarness will appear in your source tree
  • There will be at least one “The Great Refactoring” episode on the project that you will hence use to date episodes from the project.  BDUF all you want, YAGNI all you want, it’s still gonna happen.  If it doesn’t, then your code probably sucks.
  • At least one grand sounding design idea will generate excitement only to lead to abject failure and disappointment
  • At some point you will look at a grand design and suddenly realize a much simpler way to achieve the same goal — but it’s too late
  • You’ll do at least one refactoring that makes you walk away and say “I wish we’d done that sooner”
  • You’ll do at least one refactoring that makes you walk away and say “Man, I’m glad we did that”
  • You will look back at 6 month old code and groan in utter frustration at your lack of ability
  • Design strategies that worked well on one project can easily flop on the next project

About Jeremy Miller

Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net, StoryTeller for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net, and one of the principal developers behind FubuMVC. Jeremy's thoughts on all things software can be found at The Shade Tree Developer at http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller.
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  • http://www.bluespire.com/blogs Rob

    dude…you are so right on.

  • http://computeristsolutions.com josh

    had to laugh at the TestHarness project observation.

  • http://www.infozerk.com/averyblog James Avery

    Don’t forget:

    You will attempt a huge refactoring at one point, spend hours or days on it, then realize it is pure folly and thank god for source control.

  • http://devlicio.us/blogs/derik_whittaker/default.aspx Derik Whittaker

    Excellent post Jeremy.

    Simply yet elegant.

  • http://andersnoras.com Anders Norås

    Spot on!

  • http://developernotes.com Nick Parker

    Clean whiteboards – we just got two 6 foot by 8 foot white boards delivered this week – sadly one is still clean.

  • http://www.geekswithblogs.net/robz Robz

    I love whiteboards. I love to draw!

    Give me the marker, give me the marker! :D

  • http://chadmyers.lostechies.com Chad Myers

    The set of markers we have for our board has a white dry erase marker. We’re still scratching our heads over that one.

  • http://blog.symbiotic-development.com Symon Rottem

    Oh man – I think you just summed up my whole life…

  • http://RoryBecker.Blogspot.com Rory Becker

    Clean whiteboard = Open invitation.

    A flawless set of observations :)