Code Obsession

On 7-9 July 2018, I had the opportunity to speak at OpenWest in Salt Lake City, Utah. I gave 2 talks across the 3 days. Code Reviews (Don't have to Suck)  -  7 July 2018 According to a 2016 survey by Smart Bear Software code reviews are the #1 way to improve code quality. Come to this session to learn the benefits of reviewing code, as well as different tools and techniques for conducting code reviews. Professional Software Craftsmanship  - 8  July 2018 As our profession grows and matures, it becomes more and more important for us to develop a sense of what it means to be a software professional. Analogies to existing professions are easily drawn. Precision and analytical problem solving are essential. So are we engineers? Creativity and willingness to try things we’ve never done are core to success. So are we artists? We are a new breed of professional that draws on but is unique from what has come before. Info about the conference can be found  here . The slid...

This week I am attending the O'Reilly Architecture Conference in NYC with my team and I had the pleasure of attending a two day training on Building Evolutionary Architectures presented by Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons . During this session, on of the things we talked about extensively was coupling. We looked at dependency maps for different architectural styles including the big ball of mud . We saw something like the following and almost everyone agreed, "That is a bad architecture." Big Ball of Mud This reminded me of something I has seen elsewhere before, and after a quick search, I found it: Amazon and Netflix Death Star Architectures The ball of mud is considered obviously wrong by most architects, but the death star seems to be held up as an ideal by just as many and likely most of the same architects. Why is this? Are afferent coupling (inbound dependencies) and efferent coupling (outreaching dependencies) only important at a certain sc...

On 8 February 2018, I had the opportunity to speak at The SLC .NET User Group in Draper, Utah. Professional Software Craftsmanship   As our profession grows and matures, it becomes more and more important for us to develop a sense of what it means to be a software professional. Analogies to existing professions are easily drawn. Precision and analytical problem solving are essential. So are we engineers? Creativity and willingness to try things we’ve never done are core to success. So are we artists? We are a new breed of professional that draws on but is unique from what has come before. Info about the meetup can be found  here . A version of the slides for Professional Software Craftsmanship can be found   here .