Name Things Well
Shakespeare said, “a rose by any other name…” To him, a name was just a label for something deeply intrinsic within the thing itself. But in software, it’s the opposite. There is no intrinsic-ness to any software objects except what they do and so our names become more than labels, they become expressions of the …
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Read MoreHide How with What
As I was writing my book, Beyond Legacy Code, I started to see a pattern emerge. Practice 1 is “say what, why, and for whom before how.” One of the anti-patterns in software development, and therefore something that we want to avoid, is leaking implementation details in our code by saying how we do something …
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Read MoreUnderstand Trade-Offs
When we talk about code qualities and code quality practices we may have a tendency to believe that more is better, universally but that’s not always the case. We want software to run fast but we also want it to be easy to understand when we go to change it. Sometimes these characteristics and qualities …
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Read MoreLet Go of Perfectionism
It was Voltaire who said, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” By that what I believe he meant was that while it might be good to strive for perfection we have to realize that we won’t always achieve it and if we are going to insist on everything being perfect we …
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