What did you learn in 2009?

[Adewale Oshineye]

I've been reading various pundit's reflections on their predictions for 2009.
It made me want to ask the rest of you, what have you learned in 2009?

[Chris Parsons]

Hi Ade

Funnily enough, I wrote a blog post just this past week about my main realisation from the year:

http://chrismdp.github.com/2009/12/rip-web-1-0/

Highlight from a web developer's perspective: Web 1.0 seems to have died this year, certainly in our client's eyes. Javascript is on the rise, Rails is getting thinner, great UX now has to come as standard.

Anyone else?

Chris

2009/12/28 Adewale Oshineye <ade...@gmail.com>

I've been reading various pundit's reflections on their predictions for 2009.
It made me want to ask the rest of you, what have you learned in 2009?

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[Dave Hoover]

My biggest lesson from 2009, which I'm still digesting is, not
surprisingly from Kent Beck. In June, Kent wrote about a topic near
and dear to my heart, startups:
http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=252

In that blog post he says something that seemed controversial,
"Sometimes tests and refactoring help speed the feedback loop, but
sometimes not. You will have to exercise judgement in your engineering
practices to maximize capital efficiency."

The important context of these statements is that he is talking about
a startup at a specific *stage* (the takeoff stage). In the 6 months
since reading Kent's posts on this topic, I've seen my main project
(madmimi.com) transition from takeoff to climb. Kent's blog post
helped me understand why it sometimes felt right to leave parts of the
code untested, and why, as we transitioned to our next stage, testing
and rigor became more important.

I'm currently trying to put together an audition for Software
Craftsmanship 2010 to help illustrate these concepts in living code.

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Adewale Oshineye <ade...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been reading various pundit's reflections on their predictions for 2009.
> It made me want to ask the rest of you, what have you learned in 2009?
>

[Ron Jeffries]

Hello, Dave.

In my opinion, the advice you quote below is some of the most
dangerous and easily misinterpreted advice Kent has ever given.

It is possible that an individual can go faster for a little while
with no tests, if the software doesn't have to work very well. I am
not convinced at all that one can go faster for six months that way.
I am not convinced that a team can go faster at all that way.

I am convinced, however, that it takes great judgment and experience
to decide well when not to test.

Regards,

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com
www.xprogramming.com/blog
My advice is to do it by the book, get good at the practices, then do as
you will. Many people want to skip to step three. How do they know?

[Sukant Hajra]

Excerpts from Adewale Oshineye's message of Mon Dec 28 10:24:11 -0600 2009:

>
> I've been reading various pundit's reflections on their predictions for 2009.
> It made me want to ask the rest of you, what have you learned in 2009?

Hi Adewale, everyone,

I haven't been in industry for too long, so I don't know how stale the
following message is, but this year was when it hit me in full-force.

Java the Language is dead, but Java the Platform is alive and well.

There appear to be three platforms that dominate craftsmanship circles these
days: Ruby, .NET, and Java (feel free to jump in if that estimation is
inaccurate). Each of these platforms seems to have a different relationship
with ployglot programming (and I'm not talking about the obvious polyglot stuff
we do day-to-day like PL/SQL, shell scripting, and XML grammars).

The Ruby guys seem to be the most monoglot of the lot. The .NET guys seem to
have a few more languages on their platform (VB, F#, etc.), but the JVM has had
an explosion of languages. And as far as market share is concerned, I'm not
sure there's a clear winner.

I wasn't in this industry when Java first broke out on the scene in the mid
90's. I don't know what it really /felt/ like when C/C++ programmers began
their migration to the JVM. But JNI has enough development impedance that I
imagine the transition was abrupt for some.

However, the transition from Java to these other languages might be less
abrupt. The languages all compile to simple Java classes. There's some
name-mangling problems, but the impedance doesn't seem nearly as bad as from
C-to-Java.

So I'm not sure how the new languages on the JVM are going to play out.
Personally, I'm interested in Scala, because I don't want to see static typing
/completely/ dismissed.

Anyway, that was my big take-away this year.

-Sukant

[Dave Hoover]

Ron,

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Ron Jeffries <ronje...@acm.org> wrote:
> Hello, Dave.
>
> In my opinion, the advice you quote below is some of the most
> dangerous  and easily misinterpreted advice Kent has ever given.

I will do my best to be careful in my interpretation and regurgitation
of Kent's ideas on startups.

> It is possible that an individual can go faster for a little while
> with no tests, if the software doesn't have to work very well. I am
> not convinced at all that one can go faster for six months that way.
> I am not convinced that a team can go faster at all that way.

I am convinced that it works in certain cases, but those cases do not
include wide swaths of the code base, nor do they include situations
where there are teams involved.

> I am convinced, however, that it takes great judgment and experience
> to decide well when not to test.

Agreed.

[Jason Gorman]

I learned that producing a West End comedy show is easier than most
software projects I've been involved in and involves less egos, and
that the only factors in both that really matter are talent, good
ideas, application, and an audience that gets it :-)

There is no "secret" to comedy, and there's no "secret" to software
development. We need to stop looking for it, IMHO.

Jason Gorman
http://www.codemanship.com

[Zach Dennis]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 6:11 PM, Jason Gorman <goo...@parlezuml.com> wrote:
> I learned that producing a West End comedy show is easier than most
> software projects I've been involved in and involves less egos, and
> that the only factors in both that really matter are talent, good
> ideas, application, and an audience that gets it :-)
>
> There is no "secret" to comedy, and there's no "secret" to software
> development. We need to stop looking for it, IMHO.

You will never find what you do not seek, nor will you enjoy the
benefits of a journey you do not take. It's not the destination that
is important,

>
> Jason Gorman
> http://www.codemanship.com
>
> On Dec 28, 4:24 pm, Adewale Oshineye <adew...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I've been reading various pundit's reflections on their predictions for 2009.
>> It made me want to ask the rest of you, what have you learned in 2009?
>

> --
>
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>
>
>

--
Zach Dennis
http://www.continuousthinking.com (personal)
http://www.mutuallyhuman.com (hire me)
http://ideafoundry.info/behavior-driven-development (first rate BDD training)
@zachdennis (twitter)

[Jason Gorman]

I'm not saying "don't try", I'm just saying that there really is no
more to the journey than practice and hard work. If anything, I'm
saying there are no magic fixes. The road we are on has no shortcuts.

> @zachdennis (twitter)- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Mark Nijhof]

The single biggest thing I learned in 2009 is that writing a book is
much harder then I imagined, but is also much more rewarding then
expected. It truly is one big learning experience.

Things that where confirmed once again was f.ex. that OSS development
is a very good way to improve and expand your skills, you push your
code / ideas out in the open and hopefully (usually) get good /
critical feedback in return. The learning experience is just not the
same when it is done in closed quarters or even in a team. The more
people that tell me their opinion the more likely it is that I'll
change my own.

I also learned that I wish there where boutique shops like 8th Light
and Obtiva in Scandinavia.

And Twitter is a great way to get into contact with other great people.

-Mark

[Jason Gorman]

And I guess I'm also saying there's a type of person who will sit at
the side of the road pontificating about "what it means to 'be on a
journey'", and whatever it means, it cannot be learned by sitting at
the side of the road :-)

On Dec 28, 11:31 pm, Zach Dennis <zach.den...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 6:11 PM, Jason Gorman <goo...@parlezuml.com> wrote:
> > I learned that producing a West End comedy show is easier than most
> > software projects I've been involved in and involves less egos, and
> > that the only factors in both that really matter are talent, good
> > ideas, application, and an audience that gets it :-)
>
> > There is no "secret" to comedy, and there's no "secret" to software
> > development. We need to stop looking for it, IMHO.
>
> You will never find what you do not seek, nor will you enjoy the
> benefits of a journey you do not take. It's not the destination that
> is important,
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Jason Gorman
> >http://www.codemanship.com
>
> > On Dec 28, 4:24 pm, Adewale Oshineye <adew...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I've been reading various pundit's reflections on their predictions for 2009.
> >> It made me want to ask the rest of you, what have you learned in 2009?
>
> > --
>
> > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "software_craftsmanship" group.
> > To post to this group, send email to software_cr...@googlegroups.com.
> > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to software_craftsma...@googlegroups.com.

[Christian Vest Hansen]

Through the craftsmanship movement, my horizon has been expanded.
Still, I feel my person have not moved very much. Something like "the
map is not the terrain." I would like to do something about this in
2010.

But I did not stay still either. TDD became my default and primary way
of working this year. It has made a big impact on the quality of my
work, and my process of working.

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 5:24 PM, Adewale Oshineye <ade...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been reading various pundit's reflections on their predictions for 2009.
> It made me want to ask the rest of you, what have you learned in 2009?
>

> --
>
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>
>
>

--
Venlig hilsen / Kind regards,
Christian Vest Hansen.

[Enrique Comba Riepenhausen]

This is a nice and challenging question indeed Ade!

2009 has been a moved year in which a lot of things have happened to me which I can reflect on; some good, some bad. I will try to reflect on them:

First I have learned that the community we are in (at least from my vantage point) is transforming slowly into a tangible group of friends/colleagues that help each other in the pursuit of mastery in the craft.

I have changed my way of life focusing even more on practicing than I was before (I invested about an hour a day in recent years to learn something new which has transformed in easily 2-4hrs a day).

Lately (through discussions with different people and little aha moments) I realised that a lot of work has to be done in the area of knowledge transfer. I want to find out a way where I can pass on the path I walked and not just the result of my learning. How can we do this? I am still looking for the answers.

The idea of a wandering book grew at the beginning of the year and the book made many hops collecting the ideas from people of this movement. It is definitively a great addition to our resource pool and I am planning to expand the idea further this coming year.

A few days ago though I had one of the biggest revelations of this year and I will post an article about that in my blog soon (I am still ruminating the learnings from that moment). In short, the revelation came from a house visit of a doctor. The level of professionalism and humanity in him made me think about our craft and how to apply his way of working to our relationships with our customers.

By the end of the year I was delighted to join Chris Parson's workshop (Eden Development) and I am glad I did! Since I joined a lot of ideas and plans are taking form. Working alongside Chris and all the people at Eden is a real honour and pleasure. If you ever happen to be in Winchester drop me (or Chris) a mail and we will happily invite you into the workshop to spend the day coding with us.

Apart from that I am still walking my long road trying to learn every day something new, reading a lot (a minimum of 50 pages a day) and coding as much as I can...

Enrique

On 28 Dec 2009, at 16:24, Adewale Oshineye wrote:

> I've been reading various pundit's reflections on their predictions for 2009.
> It made me want to ask the rest of you, what have you learned in 2009?
>

[Robert Martin]

In 2009 I learned to separate the concepts of "mess" and "trade-off". It is often wise to create structures that are less than ideal for the sake of time and energy; but it is never wise to make a mess. You can make pragmatic choices, and still be "clean". Making pragmatic trade-offs does not mean "rushing". Instead, you choose a course that you know is less than ideal, but that serves the purpose for the moment, and then you implement it as cleanly as possible.

----
Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) | email: uncl...@objectmentor.com
Object Mentor Inc. | blog: blog.objectmentor.com
The Agile Transition Experts | web: www.objectmentor.com
800-338-6716 | twitter: unclebobmartin

[Eric Smith]

Just gonna throw together a list of the top of my head - not as profound as some of the other entries.  I don't claim expertise in these areas, these are just some things I learned about this year.

• Starting a user group is easy - maintaining it is hard.  I had it mentally the other way around.
• XNA programming for XBox
• Unit Testing Legacy C# code
• Goal Driven AI
• Java 2D
• Unit Testing some of the hard bits in Java (events leap to mind - spent a lot of time with JUnit Recipes)
• Vim - surprising myself
• Almost every nook and cranny of the Limelight framework (that'll happen when you write documentation)
• Writing complicated unit tests will lead to writing complicated code - some lessons need to be relearned.

Most importantly

• Sliding on the ice on the sidewalk outside your house is not a good idea

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Adewale Oshineye <ade...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've been reading various pundit's reflections on their predictions for 2009.
It made me want to ask the rest of you, what have you learned in 2009?

[Munaf Sheikh]

Hi, first email to the group. Things I learned:
+ it's not the idea that matters, it's the implementation of it.
+ you can't patent a thought - only your implementation of it.
+ a successful project requires both good management and good
implementers.
+ work time is work time, no matter how disguised as play time/holiday
it is.
+ with commit rights comes great power, but also great responsibility.
+ Don't be shy. If you ended up thinking "I told you so" and no-one
knows that you were right, then it's actually your fault the project
failed.

Seasons greetings..

On Wed, 2009-12-30 at 08:20 -0600, Eric Smith wrote:
> Just gonna throw together a list of the top of my head - not as
> profound as some of the other entries. I don't claim expertise in
> these areas, these are just some things I learned about this year.

> * Starting a user group is easy - maintaining it is hard. I had

> it mentally the other way around.

> * XNA programming for XBox
> * Unit Testing Legacy C# code
> * Goal Driven AI
> * Java 2D
> * Unit Testing some of the hard bits in Java (events leap to

> mind - spent a lot of time with JUnit Recipes)

> * Vim - surprising myself
> * Almost every nook and cranny of the Limelight framework

> (that'll happen when you write documentation)

> * Writing complicated unit tests will lead to writing

> complicated code - some lessons need to be relearned.
> Most importantly

> * Sliding on the ice on the sidewalk outside your house is not a

> good idea
>
> On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Adewale Oshineye <ade...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> I've been reading various pundit's reflections on their
> predictions for 2009.
> It made me want to ask the rest of you, what have you learned
> in 2009?
>
> --
>
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>
>
>
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[Dave Hoover]

Just to riff off of Munaf's learnings...

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 8:45 AM, Munaf Sheikh <munaf....@gmail.com> wrote:
> + a successful project requires both good management and good
> implementers.

One of my biggest lessons in my work on madmimi.com over the last 2
years, is the importance of a great customer. I've never had a great
customer before this project. Despite the fact that we had no
management, and I was the sole implementor for much of the project, I
must say that the success of the project was largely due to the
commitment, enthusiasm, and genius of the customer.

I must say I agree wholeheartedly with Pete McBreen on the importance
of customers...

"The key to a successful project is putting a good team of developers
together with a good customer." Software Craftsmanship: The New
Imperative

[Bobby Johnson]

Things I learned this year:

* It is OK to have strong opinions, so long as they are weakly held. Please, show me the error of my ways so that I can learn from you.

* I rediscovered my love for javascript thanks to jquery. It is just so damn elegant. Unobtrusive javascript is a concept we should have been talking about over a decade ago.

* "You have to go slow to go fast." Thanks, Uncle Bob.

* Organizations that adopt SCRUM but abandon all the Agile practices have adopted a great methodology to push developers to generate reams of crappy code that is poorly documented.

* In the .NET ecosystem there are companies that value quality and craftsmanship over cheap warm bodies and gant charts. You have to actively go looking for them and none of them are involved with state government.

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[Adewale Oshineye]

2009/12/28 Adewale Oshineye <ade...@gmail.com>:

> I've been reading various pundit's reflections on their predictions for 2009.
> It made me want to ask the rest of you, what have you learned in 2009?
>

I should probably answer my own question. I've written a blog post:
http://blog.oshineye.com/2010/01/what-did-i-learn-in-2009.html with
more detail but essentially 2009 was the year where I learned:
- that the Agile movement has jumped the shark.
- that many of my tools/techniques (including TDD and automated
refactoring) have limits beyond which they need to be replaced or
supplemented.
- about the Scalability Staircase:
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddkgd7hz_100hhbqgtc6
- to really appreciate the value of feature partitioning/feature segmentation
- that it's better to model people who are effective rather than
people who are brilliant
- that it's better to seek to make repeated small improvements in
skill rather than looking to make big jumps
- that it's better to choose your role models and communities based on
the artefacts they've generated rather than the opinions they've
espoused
- about Web Scale Identifiers:
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ddkgd7hz_91c42qwgpf

[Spencer Turner]

Hi All,

I am new to the community, but I thought I'd try and share what I have learned this year.

1) Being surrounded by people who know far more than you *and* are willing to share that knowledge is a great way to learn.

2) The lessons I am learning through my apprenticeship are great lessons to pass on to my young son as life skills.

3) If you are willing to take a risk and work hard (and you are lucky), you can pursue the things you are passionate about, even if you don't have directly related qualifications.

There is plenty of technical stuff that I could mention, but all of it so 'white-belt' as to be inconsequential. 

Best Regards

Spencer

[Adewale Oshineye]

2010/1/3 Spencer Turner <spencer...@googlemail.com>:

> --
Spencer,
Please mention it anyway. Stuff that may be inconsequentially 'white
belt' to you may be new to other people.

[Spencer Turner]

Hi Ade

OK, the main 'technical' things I've learned are:

1) No amount of TDD will help you if you have no idea where you are heading. Test driving, like car driving still requires a direction you want to go in. When people talk about 'driving out' an interface, or a model or whatever, they already have some idea what they want to drive out...

2) On the same theme, you can just as easily take a wrong turn as with tests as without them. However, getting back in the right direction is easier with tests, as you start to see where you went wrong.

3) Really, this a broader point, which is simply that working with people who do test well and test first, it has reinforced wholeheartedly what I already felt regarding testing / TDD / BDD being best practice.

4) View testing is hard to do well / fast / in a non-brittle way that is still effective.

5) Teaching something one has done for a long-time instinctively, to someone who has no frame of reference is hard and people who do it well make it look / feel easy. (Thanks to all those patient people!)

6) Reading other people's code is a really interesting, I always learn at least 1 new thing.

Hope that is helpful to someone.

Best Regards

Spencer

[Mark Nijhof]

Very good and true observations!

-Mark

[Adam Sroka]

Hi Spencer:

Great stuff. Something to think about for 2010: When you pair with
experienced TDDers try to find out what they really know about where
they are going. Perhaps they don't know as much as you think they do,
but they have evolved strategies for where to start and they have
learned to lean on the tests to get quick feedback about the direction
they are taking...

[Adewale Oshineye]

2010/1/4 Spencer Turner <spencer...@googlemail.com>:

> --
Your lesson about view testing reminded me of this:
http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/index.html The presentation patterns
from Martin's, sadly postponed, sequel to PoEAA tend to be very useful
for separating your domain model, presentation model and view.

[Spencer Turner]

Thanks Adam and Ade,

Adam- I am sure you are right, everyone finds strategies, it is great advice to try and glean what they are.

Ade, I'll try and look into those further, thanks for the pointer.

Oh, one other thing I've learned, espresso is a requirement, not a luxury ;-)

Best Regards

Spencer

 

[Fernando Kakimoto]

Hello everyone,

a great thing that I've learned this year is "be the worst of the people you are surrounded by", or "surround yourself with really great people."

I've been working with great developers for the last 2 years and sometimes I got a little bored because I was one step behind from them. Now I've realized that this environment was fantastic and I was always learning from the best.

Now, I am one step in front of the new developers that have just arrived and I have in mind the importance to mentor them as others did with me.

Regards,
Fernando

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[Curtis Cooley]

Sadly, I learned that if you try to drag kicking and screaming a covey
of non-craftsmen into the craftsmanship movement you get let go.

Also sadly, I learned that there are 'busy-work' people that think
because you are busy you are effective. When you get one as your
manager, it's not fun or effective.

Happily, because I got let go, I had the time to learn RoR :)

I learned mastery is a journey and not a destination and that the way
of the small is important to staying on the path.

I learned the hard way that the grass is not always greener in that
other job, and sometimes that grass has just been painted with
watercolors to lure you over and it quickly washes away to its true
dull brown.
--
Curtis Cooley
curtis...@gmail.com
home:http://curtiscooley.com
blog:http://ponderingobjectorienteddesign.blogspot.com
===============
Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if
you must be without one, be without the strategy.
-- H. Norman Schwarzkopf