It was almost Christmas, I was living in London and had just started dating my wife-to-be. We'd booked a week travelling through Spain and Morocco for the the Christmas period and were looking forward to a wonderful adventure.

I had been leading a team developing a project for Argos (like the The Warehouse) and it was going into UAT (User Acceptance Testing) in early December. We were almost out of budget but the app had been thoroughly tested so we were confident it would go smoothly. And we were so wrong…

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Filed under - On Software

Its bad enough that people in the corporate environment - and i mean real people , with hopes, dreams, talents and ambitions - get reduced to being nothing more then a 'resource'. We occupy a column in MS Project alongside projectors, white boards and meeting rooms.

But i've just realised a disturbing new trend. We're not even individual 'resources' anymore. I just overheard someone in the kitchen say "...but there's not enough resource", referring to software developers. Note that the singular was deliberate and, now i think of it, its become common usage. Using a singular to refer to a collective indicates that each element of the collective is individually irrelevant and indistinguishable from the others. Its like saying "we need more sand" - you're obviously not interested in which particular grains of sand you get. But the reality is that no software project ever needs "more resource". "More resource" means putting anyone on any job. It means favouring skill (or the appearance of skill) over talent. It means inefficiency. "More resource" is what gets projects into trouble. What gets projects out of trouble is the opposite, ie the right person for the right job

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Filed under - On Software

Enterprise architects, particularly the "astronaut" kind , often like to talk about "layers" of software. As in, the business layer, the persistence layer and the presentation layer. Sometimes they get fancy and have auditing layers, security layers and all sorts of other layers.

The thing is, this implies that you can structure your big, complex systems with a very simple geometry, ie of a series of horizontal layers. But thats just absurdly naive, it never works out that way.

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Filed under - On Software

I was just having yet another read of yet another programmer's opinion on how to handle exceptions, ie whether API writers should throw checked exceptions, or just unchecked. -

I've been in a dilemma about this for years and keep hoping that some day someone will figure out a satisfactory answer.

There's certainly no shortage of opinions, but none that i've seen actually translate into programming practise which, when applied to real world scenarios, gives a good result. So here's my take...

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Filed under - On Software