Software development

Nice environments for work

This is our city, it is where we spend our working day. Things are best when people are friendly and thoughtful, and when they take time to keep the city clean and tidy.

This is our building, it is where we spend our working day. Things are best when people are friendly and thoughtful, and when they take time to keep the building clean and tidy.

This is our office, it is where we spend our working day. Things are best when people are friendly and thoughtful, and when they take time to keep the office clean and tidy.

This is our codebase…

Bugs vs feature requests

I recently re-read Jeff Attwood‘s (of Coding Horror fame) blog post That’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature Request. He talks about the eternal struggle to define a ‘bug’ as opposed to a ‘feature request’, ‘enhancement’, etc. His advice is to stop worrying about which category a piece of user feedback falls in and just worry about what to do with it.

So why do so many of us feel like we need to have these definitions?

At my current workplace I spent a bit of time reading and thinking about the “definition of a bug”. This was important for me for a few reasons. Firstly, because I generally equate a bug in the system to a developer not doing their job properly. If there are many bugs being found I feel that the dev team needs to Continue reading →

Developers as craftsmen

I was having a conversation with a friend recently about the different attitudes or philosophies that developers take to their work. As with any profession these attitudes vary quite a bit between individuals. I explained that I’m a fan of viewing a software engineer as a craftsman. There are a few things to take from this point of view including that we should take pride in our work, we should actively maintain and improve our skills, and that we should have a good knowledge and understanding our tools and processes.

Not too long after that conversation I was reading a blog post by ‘Uncle Bob’ Martin on Continue reading →