Saturday, April 22, 2017

Software Craftsman Chapters 7 and 8

Chapter 7

One of the main reasons to implement an Agile environment I believe is that you are constantly reviewing and re-tooling the process to make it work in an efficient manner. I like how he opens with something similar to this and says something to the effect of not being tied down to a heap of documents and diagrams that were written a century ago. Technologies change fast today so what may have been good yesterday may not be good today, literally. In the author’s words Agile development provides a “quick, short feedback loop”. I understand, but I don’t understand why all companies don’t use extreme programming practices. He says that in one company they noticed a 1/3 reduction in production bugs. That is amazing and saves the company a lot of cash and it’s amazing that companies seem to value it so little as far as the book says anyway. I like his stance on how to convince a manager to use the practices by promoting the value of the methodology instead of the practice of it. That is good advice. Another thing that I was surprised by was the efficiency of automated testing, I mean I know that is a time saver and all that, but I didn’t realize the scale of its goodness. It does make sense though because as he says, “as the system grows so do the number of tests.”. Writing them before hand is a time saver and also gives you something to code to. I am not going to go into the rest of the chapter because it is a repeat of the Clean Coder. Test Driven Development, Refactoring, Pair Programming, Refactoring, Continuous integration, yada, yada, yada. I find that the book has its good points, but it is a lot of Clean Coder and I think that either one or the other should be read, but certainly not both in my opinion.

Chapter 8


This chapter brought back memories of me and my good ole commodore 64 chopping away at te keys in basic. I only wish I had stuck with it back then, but I am glad that I got back to my roots and got back into it again. I think out of all of the chapters I relate to this one the most, but on a personal level. I like the Yogi Berra quote, “ You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might not get there.” I thought I was doing what I loved at my last job until I got hurt that is. Then I was in a whole new situation and I didn’t like it. I am finally at the point that I know what I want to do and am happy with the decision, but it took a while to get here. I have been and am using a lot of his tactics. Expanding technical knowledge, attending user groups, and networking to name a few and they have been fantastic to me. Like he says a career is an investment. I am glad I am a bit older and have gained a lot of wisdom along the way so the process of changing careers has been ok, scary in a way but ok. I am doing what I love and can’t wait to put it into practice.

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