Development
A Post on Growth as a Developer
Oct 4th
My good friend and colleague David posted “Growing as a Developer” and highlights two key points that helped him grow as a developer. While he gives me some kudos for being one that influenced him, he also influenced me and gave me new perspectives to look at. I will miss being able to seek out his opinion in person, however, now that he has at least signed up to Twitter perhaps we won’t be that out of touch (*nudge*).
Give the post a read; it’s short and sweet and includes links to some books that every developer should read at any level in their career.
Should You Fix Working Software? Part 1: The Question
Jul 10th
A few weeks ago I did my first code review on work that I had no involvement with other than some initial brainstorming and high-level architecture. As I was looking at the code I only saw one or two things that concerned me but even those were not critical. When I typed up the review I realized that first and foremost I need to clarify that the software was working and frankly, it’s hard to argue with working software.
In this case the component was designed with good object-oriented principles and there was really only one place where I thought a particular class had too many responsibilities. The developer, who is pretty new to REJIS, was extremely open to the feedback and all in all it was a good experience.
This had me thinking, what if you were reviewing software which wasn’t designed using good object-oriented principles? If the software was working, what angle would you take to suggest changing the design without offending the author? This is a tough question because there are many organizations where the development teams have a mix of procedural minded and object-oriented coders.
My friend and colleague David Risko wrote about this in his post "The Elusiveness of Object-Oriented Thinking". His post highlights some of the challenges of bringing developers into the OO space. Fundamentally OO breaks many of the traditions of traditional procedural thinking. It is a mind-shift that can be difficult to make and in a mixed environment where you have those in an OO mindset and those who are not, the differences begin to surface more often.
So what about that 1,000 line class with 3 methods and if statements nested 5 deep? It works and it’s consistent. How do you show that developer ways they could improve it’s readability or flow?
