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- Stack Overflow is down, and your developers suddenly aren’t as productive as usually 😜
- Slack is down, and communication is halted. Everyone freaks out, and no work gets done.
- Your hoster has problems with their energy and their emergency energy, and servers stop and reboot. You have to take care of this.
- all kinds of things…
One metric
Let the computer help you with that comment
Time well spent
Don't build a five-star hotel
Risk list
Imagine you are doing a software project. It is mostly going like planned. Things happen. You anticipated them and prepared for them. But there are days when unexpected things happen:
Cyclomatic complexity
if/else) or branches in your code lead to higher complexity.
How to paint a fence
Planning for technical debt
Standing in for quality
All your data are belong to us
The latest Chrome beta (version 70) introduces changes to the Shape Detection API and the Web Authentication API.
The Shape Detection API consists of three APIs: A Face Detection API, a Barcode Detection API and a Text Detection API. Given an image bitmap or a blob, the Face Detection API returns the location of faces and the locations of eyes, noses, and mouths within those faces. To give you rudimentary control of performance, you can limit the number of returned faces and prioritize speed over performance.
They cannot (yet) compare faces and recognize known faces in the browser. Give it a year. Soon browser plugin creators are able to scan the photos you upload to Facebook and identify the people you had fun with last night. If you think I am exaggerating, please wait for the next paragraph.
All your data are belong to us
The latest Chrome beta (version 70) introduces changes to the Shape Detection API and the Web Authentication API.
The Shape Detection API consists of three APIs: A Face Detection API, a Barcode Detection API and a Text Detection API. Given an image bitmap or a blob, the Face Detection API returns the location of faces and the locations of eyes, noses, and mouths within those faces. To give you rudimentary control of performance, you can limit the number of returned faces and prioritize speed over performance.
They cannot (yet) compare faces and recognize known faces in the browser. Give it a year. Soon browser plugin creators are able to scan the photos you upload to Facebook and identify the people you had fun with last night. If you think I am exaggerating, please wait for the next paragraph.
Again, why are we doing this?
Imagine you have a team member that always criticises your work. You make commit after commit and put your best effort forth, you try to find the best names for variables and methods. You check your code using tools like RuboCop and Linters. Yet in every pull request, he asks you whether you considered refactoring objects. Things like extracting some logic out of a class, introducing view models and repository objects and sometimes even crazy stuff like domain driven design ideas. Why can’t he leave you alone?
I tell you why: Because the fundamentals matter. They make the difference between software projects where things go smoothly and projects that just fail.
Again, why are we doing this?
Imagine you have a team member that always criticises your work. You make commit after commit and put your best effort forth, you try to find the best names for variables and methods. You check your code using tools like RuboCop and Linters. Yet in every pull request, he asks you whether you considered refactoring objects. Things like extracting some logic out of a class, introducing view models and repository objects and sometimes even crazy stuff like domain driven design ideas. Why can’t he leave you alone?
I tell you why: Because the fundamentals matter. They make the difference between software projects where things go smoothly and projects that just fail.
Art
Where's your GPS
The four types of documentation
You probably already noticed from the title of this letter, the topic of documentation is still important to me. Now that I began spending time with it I notice the many different aspects of documentation. And there’s more than I thought.
Today I want to share a resource with you that taught me about the four different levels/types of docs. I didn’t even know that there were four levels, or why they mattered. They start with something very important:
It doesn’t matter how good your software is, because if the documentation is not good enough, people will not use it.
Stardom (continued)
I received great replies to my letter last week. I want to quote two for you today.
First is Jacob Wyke on the question why these people become some kinds of star for you an me.
I think its because they teach people things, and so generations of developers look up to them as they taught them things.
Stardom
Code Quality through high-quality docs
Hi friend.
I am going to drum the quality drum again. This is a big topic and I know for a fact that I haven’t even scratched the surface of what there is to say about it.
About a month ago I wrote
I’d like to admit, I never had a mentor or teacher who showed me how to properly document software. It was all learning by doing. If you don’t mind, I’ll take some future episodes of this newsletter to document (see what I did there? 👅) my findings and further thoughts about this topic.
This is one of these letters about documentation. My knowledge hasn’t grown by as much as I would have loved, but I read some interesting articles about docs. I want to share these with you.