The head judge of Top Chef, Tom Colicchio, has expressed a simple mnemonic for dealing with customer problems in a restaurant setting. There are three...more.
Bugs, defects, issues, glitches, hidden features—call them what you want, but inevitably we discover that something in our software system is not working as expected....more.
In recent years, various code schools have flooded the developer markets with hordes of beginners. These schools have done a great job of introducing people...more.
Communication is hard, especially in the software industry that has for whatever reason preferred introverts for decades. That stereotype is slowly eroding, but it doesn’t...more.
Let's play a word association game. When I say "stack overflow" what comes to mind? Is it Spolsky and Atwood's popular question and answer site?...more.
I was privileged this past weekend to attend the SoCraTes (Software Craftsmanship and Testing) 2014 conference in Soltau, Germany. I've heard about this Software Craftsmanship...more.
I used to ask a question when interviewing apprentice candidates that was designed to discover their passion: “When was the last time you stayed up...more.
Throughout my childhood, I have strong memories of my mother, an IT professional, singing “Anything you can do, I can do better” (from the Irving...more.
Today marks the 5th Anniversary of the publication of the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship. We are doing a couple of things to celebrate to mark...more.
Five years ago, a handful of us nervously deployed a little application that held some pretty lofty ideals for the future of software development. We...more.
In 1826 Marc Isambard Brunel and Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a father and son engineering team, sought to build a tunnel under the Thames river in...more.
A recent search on Career Builder, found that out of over 12,000 software development positions, only 120 of them were tagged ”entry level.“ With a...more.
Scenario: We are sitting in a planning meeting and a business stakeholder asks one simple question. “How hard would that be?” What answer do we...more.
I recently sat through a software development team retrospective. The facilitator began the retro by taking the “temperature” of the room. He asked us to...more.
“It's kind of a Frankenstein.” We’ve used this phrase more than a few times to describe the architecture and technology used to design a product...more.
Craftsmanship has been used as a metaphor for software development. Pete McBreen argues in his book “Software Craftsmanship” that craft is a better metaphor for...more.
I spent the beginning of my career working on embedded systems for some audio company. These embedded systems were my first love in programming and...more.
There has been an interesting discussion happening about adding a 5th value statement to the Agile Manifesto. Uncle Bob Martin proposed this addition earlier this...more.
I’m a big fan of agile. I’ve long been convinced that the agile movement truly is uncovering ways to do software better. It’s revolutionizing the...more.
The most widespread and common greeting in the American culture is the handshake. Handshakes are shared between anyone meeting for the first time, and at...more.
