Moving Quickly with Compositional Chains
When you find a more powerful tool, it’s hard to avoid using it. We like to think of this as the ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ syndrome, but the fact of the matter is - I have plenty of tools. It’s just that some are more powerful and it's hard not to use them.
Last night, I was playing noise music . . .
Detecting Refactoring Diligence
We’re really at a point in the industry where all developers should be aware of the importance of continuous refactoring. It’s easy to look at deteriorating code bases and get the sense that if only we’d done large refactorings along the way things would be better. But, code goes bad slowly and it happens through a predictable process. We add . . .
Detecting Shoved Code
I’m constantly amazed at how biological code seems. It grows and it sprawls. It becomes easier to patch than change deeply. I have this theory that any system the where the cost of changing old structure is high has a strong biological feel. Code, in the worst cases, is like a decaying city. It's easy to add a new sign or a clean up a . . .
Using Repository Analysis to Find Single Responsibility Violations
I’ve been thinking about cohesion, coupling, and the Single Responsibility Principle quite a bit recently. The other day I realized that cohesion is harder to explain or understand than coupling. I figured I’d put that thought out into the world via twitter (not realizing that Glenn Vanderburg had said essentially the same thing about four . . .
An Open Letter to the FCC on Net Neutrality
Over the past 30 years, the internet has transformed the world in immeasurable ways. As internet use spread from universities to the mainstream, millions of people were able to access and contribute knowledge, build businesses and connect with the world - at first with simple dialup modems over phone lines and later with more advanced . . .
Microservices Until Macro Complexity
At QCon New York last month I hosted a panel on architecture and nearly all of the questions were about microservices. It isn’t hard to sense the excitement many are feeling about this approach. When I first heard about microservices, the people talking about them framed them as a reaction to monolithic architecture, frameworks, and SOA. It . . .
Microservices and the Failure of Encapsulation
One of the things that we don’t appreciate enough in software development is the way that ideas echo across the industry. I remember seeing Rich Hickey and Stu Halloway presenting Datomic and feeling palpable echoes of git’s repository model. A similar thing happened to me a while ago with microservices - I got the sense that they were an . . .