Category: Programming
General thoughts and stories about programming and life as a programmer.
Things Everyone Forgets Before Committing Code
May 4, 2017 2 minutes read Committing code involves, in a dramatic sense, two universes colliding. Firstly, you have the universe of your own work and metaphorical workbench. You’ve worked...
What DevOps Means for Static Analysis
April 13, 2017 1 minutes read For most of my career, software development has, in a very specific way, resembled mailing a letter. You write the thing, and then you...
Why Expert Developers Still Make Mistakes
April 6, 2017 7 minutes read When pressed, I bet you can think of an interesting dichotomy in the software world. On the one hand, we programmers seem an extraordinarily...
Exploring the Technical Debt In Your Codebase
March 3, 2017 1 minutes read Recently, I posted about how the new version of NDepend lets you compute tech debt. In that post, I learned that I had earned...
The One Thing Every Company Can Do to Reduce Technical Debt
February 23, 2017 2 minutes read The idea of technical debt has become ubiquitous in our industry. It started as a metaphor to help business stakeholders understand the compounding cost...
Computing Technical Debt with NDepend
February 16, 2017 2 minutes read For years, I have struggled to articulate technical debt to non-technical stakeholders. This struggle says something, given that technical debt makes an excellent metaphor...
Learning Programming with Hands on Projects
February 9, 2017 1 minutes read If you want a surefire way to make money, look for enormous disparity between demand and supply. As software developers, we understand this implicitly....
What Metrics Should the CIO See?
February 2, 2017 1 minutes read I’ve worked in the programming industry long enough to remember a less refined time. During this time, the CIO (or CFO, since IT used...
Recovering from a Mission Critical Whiff
January 26, 2017 2 minutes read A career in software produces a handful of truly iconic moments. First, you beam with pride the first time something you wrote works in...
Adding Static Analysis to Your Team’s DNA
January 12, 2017 1 minutes read Stop me if this sounds familiar. (Well, not literally. I realize that asynchronous publication makes it hard for you to actually stop me as...
New Year’s Resolutions for Code Quality
December 29, 2016 2 minutes read Perhaps more than any other holiday I can think of, New Year’s Day has specific traditions. With other holidays, they range all over the map....
Detecting Performance Bottlenecks with NDepend
December 15, 2016 2 minutes read In the past, I’ve talked about the nature of static code analysis. Specifically, static analysis involves analyzing programs’ source code without actually executing them....
How Much Code Should My Developers Be Responsible For?
December 8, 2016 1 minutes read As I work with more and more organizations, my compiled list of interesting questions grows. Seriously – I have quite the backlog. And I...
Concreteness: Entering the Zone of Pain
November 10, 2016 1 minutes read Years ago, when I first downloaded a trial of NDepend, I chuckled when I saw the “Abstractness vs. Instability” graph. The concept itself does...
How to Prioritize Bugs on Your To-Do List
November 3, 2016 1 minutes read People frequently ask me questions about code quality. People also frequently ask me questions about efficiency and productivity. But it seems we rarely wind up...
Static Analysis for the Build Machine?
October 20, 2016 2 minutes read I remember my earliest experiences with static analysis. Probably a decade ago, I started to read about it during grad school and poke around...
The Relationship between Static Analysis and Continuous Testing
October 13, 2016 1 minutes read As an adult, I have learned that I have an introvert type personality. I do alright socially, don’t mind public speaking, and do not...
How to Perform Effective Team Code Reviews
October 6, 2016 1 minutes read I’ve heard people say (paraphrased) that teams succeed uniformly, but fail each in its own unique way. While I might argue the veracity of...
Rewrite or Refactor?
September 29, 2016 1 minutes read I’ve trod this path before in various incarnations and I’ll do it again today. After all, I can think of few topics in software...
Secrets of Maintainable Codebases
September 28, 2016 2 minutes read You should write maintainable code. I assume people have told you this at some point. The admonishment is as obligatory as it is vague....
What to do when Your Colleague Creates Spaghetti Code
September 15, 2016 2 minutes read I write for a number of different outfits and earn my living consulting around software and IT. Because of the intersection of these three...
Considering a Port to .NET Core? Use NDepend
August 25, 2016 2 minutes read An American colloquialism holds, “only two things are certain: death and taxes.” If I had to appropriate that for the software industry, I might say that...
Plugging Leaky Abstractions
August 18, 2016 2 minutes read In 2002, Joel Spolsky coined something he called “The Law of Leaky Abstractions.” In software, an “abstraction” hides complexity of an underlying system from those...
Measure Your Code to Get Back on Track
August 11, 2016 1 minutes read When I’m called in for strategy advice on a codebase, I never arrive to find a situation where all parties want to tell me...
Easy to Miss Code Smells
July 7, 2016 2 minutes read The concept of a code smell is, perhaps, one of the most evocative in our profession. The name itself has a levity factor to...
Enforcing Immutability in Multi-Threaded Projects with NDepend
June 16, 2016 2 minutes read Early in the days of object oriented programming, we really got a lot of mileage out of the language and paradigm features. For instance,...
5 Habits that Help Code Quality
June 9, 2016 2 minutes read When I’m called in to do a strategic assessment of a codebase, it’s never the result of everything being awesome. That is, no one...
4 Ways Custom Code Metrics Improve A Development Team
May 12, 2016 2 minutes read One of the things that has surprised me over the years is how infrequently people take advantage of custom code metrics. I say this...
The Power of CQLinq for Developers
April 14, 2016 2 minutes read I can still remember my reaction to Linq when I was first exposed to it. And I mean my very first reaction. You’d think, as...
Legacy Code for Developers: Managing your Manager
March 24, 2016 2 minutes read Here’s a campfire horror story of legacy code that probably sounds at least somewhat familiar. One day, your manager strolls by casually, sipping a...