Folks seem to tune software development for a desired output rate. That’s a disaster. Here’s why, what to do instead, and (at the end) a speculation about an unhelpful belief that might underlie this behavior. I’ve been surprised to see smart folks unironically suggest that waterfall development is actually the…

Twenty five years into my career and I finally figured out my mission. This was after patterns, after xUnit, after TDD, after Extreme Programming. Only then was I able to step back and say, “What’s the puzzle of which these are the pieces?” I (like many of us) am going…

Regression Testing and the Saff Squeeze — (Originally published late 2008) Isolate a defect by starting with a system-level test. Progressively inline and prune until you have the smallest possible test that demonstrates the defect. Introduction In American football there is a play called “The Sandwich” in which two people hit the person carrying the ball simultaneously, one…

“Well I’m a senior engineer so we’ll do it my way.” I always hated conversations like that as a junior engineer but they seem to be a natural consequence of titles. Keep titles private and the best ideas will win instead of the best titles. Right? 😬 At Gusto we…

(Bringing this one back from 2013) Scott Hanselman and Drew Robbins discussed how to be a good technical presenter (http://www.hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=269). They covered valuable techniques for presenters to use, like making repeated eye contact with five or six people in the audience so everyone in the audience has a feeling of…

Originally published February 2018 I read How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen late last year. I liked the idea of living according to consciously chosen goals. However, the engineer in me wanted to know about the units of measurement. …

“Why weren’t you more ambitious as an engineer?” “After The Accident it didn’t seem worth it. Before The Accident, the only time I wasn’t working ten hours a day six days a week was when I was working twelve hours a day seven days a week.” This was one of…

A student had a code review where the reviewer said, “This variable needs to be explicitly initialized to nil.” The usual course for a junior engineer would be to change the code. Instead, the student did some research, then responded, “According to the language spec, the variable is initialized automatically.”…

The following is lightly edited from the June 2014 version. Once, a farmer interviewed a teenager for a job as a farm hand. One thing the teenager said particularly puzzled the farmer, “I can sleep when the wind blows.” The farmer didn’t know what this meant, but the teenager seemed…