Red Alert in a Silver Thaw

(note: this is a continuation of a story that starts here)

It was Fred's turn.

He could barely hear himself talk over the sound of ice being crushed under his pickup's studded tires.

"I'm telling you again, Mike. I can't do anything about this until I'm in the office."

Feature-Branching Defers Work

To quote Homer Simpson: "Did we lose a war?"

I thought we licked this problem in the aughts and early teens. Maybe it was just Seattle or maybe I'm projecting personal victories onto the industry at large.

For some reason, feature-branching is all the rage, again.

Fundamental Tenets of Design Patterns Thinking

There are four basic principles of deep design thinking. These are all paraphrased to make them easier to digest in 2018.

• Start with contracts and drive implementations to serve needs.
• Encapsulate variation so you need only attend to it in the fewest places possible.
• Couple to the highest abstractions possible.
• Delegate between objects rather than inheriting between classes.

These principles underlie all the design patterns wherever they apply.

One could write a book on these four principles. In fact, a lot of people have.

I'm going to dig into each of these more deeply in subsequent posts.

Safety Is the Foundation of Speed

Nobody would buy a car that was twice as fast as its price-competitors but had no breaks.

The ability to move safely is the ability to move quickly.

Assumption Pitfall: "The Problem is Real"

Recently, someone told me about a bug. I spent a fair amount of time investigating the bug, including quite a while trying to get a test that would reproduce it.

In the end, it turned out malformed input was being used. There was no problem.

Where the Magic Happens

Magical thinking is the fallacious assignment of a causal relationship between events. 

It's never magic.

Repeat after me.

"It's never magic. It's never magic. It's never magic."

Division of Labor