The Mindset

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about code which doesn’t deserve to be maintained. I received a lot of comments on this post. Many of them argued that unlike tangible goods, code does not decay. Some people referred me to Joel Spolsky’s article, saying that throwing away code which was already tested and used […]

Used cars. That’s what’s on my mind these days. My wife and I decided that we need a second car. But judging from the time it takes us to find one, I’m not sure we are really serious about it. Well, we are, but here’s the thing…
You see, I’m just too paranoid to put my […]

When I was just starting my way as a software developer I worked in a team writing simulators and other tools for testing engineers. Most of the tools I wrote were 100% my creation. I designed them, I wrote them, and I provided support for them. This gave me a chance to control almost every […]

Here’s a little party trick for true geeks. Take your company’s coding standards. Count the number of times an ‘_’ character appears in it. Multiply this number by the maximum number of lines allowed per function. Add the number of times the word “comment” is mentioned in the document. Divide the result by the number […]

It’s time for yet another insight regarding reviews. You probably know this is one of my favorite topics, so this should come as no surprise.
In my previous posts on reviews, I described different types of reviews, or more accurately different motivations for reviews.
In Are Your Code Reviews Effective? I described reviews designed merely for […]

In my previous post I questioned the popularity of peer reviews in the real-world. I claimed that there might be a good reason that most organizations are not practicing systematic peer reviews: the nature of peer reviews causes too much overhead and context switching, which makes them ineffective for the long run.
But what about […]

When I first wrote about professional reviews as a mentoring platform, some people responded with the question: what’s wrong with peer reviews anyway? Why do we need a person specializing in code and design reviews instead of assigning this task to peer developers within the development team?
As I explained in previous posts (and as you […]

Whenever I meet someone who is performing systematic code reviews, I am thrilled. Code reviews are close to my heart, and, believe me, meeting such a person is not a common event as one might think. So whenever I do meet such a person, I just want to know everything about how he handles his […]

In an ideal world every element of your design and every line of code would fit perfectly into the big picture. However, in reality, sometimes we have to create patches and workarounds to meet an ad-hoc necessity. There are cases which require some sort of an emergency fix “just until we have the time to sort it […]