26 May 2023
Most internal shared libraries are based on the fallacy that code sharing always makes development more efficient.
13 April 2023
We all agree that engineering enablement is important, but “platform teams” can often be a fig leaf for organisational anti-patterns and overly complex Kubernetes implementations.
13 June 2020
One of the more pervasive myths in software development is that naming things is hard.
19 February 2020
Code coverage can be a useful technique for discovering untested parts of your code base, but it makes for a useless target.
17 November 2019
Publishing a public API involves many considerations, from billing and metering through to documentation and on-boarding. These are likely to be addressed through a collection of solutions rather than a single all-singing, all-dancing API management platform.
22 June 2019
Many of the apparent benefits of monorepos can be realised through improvements in engineering culture and architecture rather than adopting a specific approach to source code storage.
8 June 2019
Maturity models are a popular way of looking at development challenges. The problem is that they are an arbitrary and inflexible tool and they tend to encourage the wrong mindset.
23 March 2019
The problem with SAFe is that you can implement it without writing a single unit test or automating a single build…scaled agile may be an oxymoron.
24 February 2019
Standardisation does have a place, but it should be reserved for infrastructure and collaboration rather than languages and tools.
30 August 2018
There is a growing sense of unease around how larger organisations have implemented agile. In particular, there is a tendency towards centralised control that can be at odds with the agile preference for individuals over process.
16 February 2018
Agile teams still need to make architecture decisions, but in supporting them architects should seek “just enough” architecture over “big design up front” and practical solutions over large-scale abstract thinking.
13 December 2017
Finely-grained, entity-based services seem to be advocated by some pretty authoritative sources. This is unfortunate as they are something of an anti-pattern that can undermine many of the benefits of decomposing an monolith into micoservices.
18 November 2017
Technical debt may be a useful metaphor for describing how bad code design undermines productivity to non-technical audiences, but it does not help in understanding the longer term problems that affect code bases.
14 August 2017
Open API and Swagger enable the same kind of automated discovery and integration that WSDL and SOAP were invented to support. In doing so they undermine the design of REST APIs and don’t even provide adequate documentation.
19 June 2017
Refactoring describes a very specific and controlled technique for improving code. The problem is that it is often used to describe wholesale changes to code bases that should be treated as a rewrite.