Holger's Blog

Today I want to share a small little idea with you. An idea that can have grave consequences if misregarded:

When you schedule a meeting with your team, also share with the team who is responsible for taking minutes/notes. One person has to be responsible for that.

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Since I strongly believe that you can only achieve high-quality work if you trust your teammates, I am trying something today. I trust you.

I will show you a skeleton in my closet.

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Over the weekend I had (kind of) a conversation with a good friend. The topic revolved around doing the work on software projects, and how that is sometimes harder to do in a right way. Because of external factors, or because of company policy. In essence, this creates frustration. Probably nothing new there for you.

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If you want to run a marathon, you have to train for it. Very few people can do that without deliberate training. You have to run for many kilometers consistently and do speed and interval training in between. If you let your training slip, it means your performance on race day will be worse.

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I believe in improving the quality of your software projects. If you want to improve something, you have to measure it first. That idea was introduced by Peter Drucker, the famous management book author.

Now if I ask you, what metrics you could measure about your code quality, would you have an answer?

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I spent the day at a new client’s office. They hired my to do a complete code quality and security audit for their website and shop system. They are rebuilding and relaunching it. The app is built using Ruby on Rails.

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From the feedback I got for my questions and letters regarding the quality of software projects, I can tell you one metric software developers look for.

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Commenting code and documenting it has been a topic in these letters already. I linked to resources on how to write docs etc. For the future, this might not be necessary anymore. Because you can have a machine write the comments for you. There is a research project done by Chinese researchers Xing Hu, Ge Li, Xin Xia, David Lo and Zhi Jin named “Deep Code Comment Generation”.

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Yesterday I went to an exciting event. The topic was “Can Artificial Intelligence synthesize software?”. The company Seerene organized the event. I haven’t heard about them before, but they are just what I like. They analyze code and projects for optimization potential and defects. I started the conversation with them, let’s see what comes out of it.

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When you want to go on vacation, somewhere far away, where you haven’t been… How do you decide for the hotel? What language speaks to you on the hotel‘s website? What images convey to you that this might be a good hotel? Do you only follow suggestions by a friend? Do you care about the vicinity to tourist attractions or important sights? How did they get your attention?

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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:

• 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…

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To achieve high quality in your team’s code, you should use tools like a static analyzer. These analyzers give you lots of metrics. One is the cyclomatic complexity. A very reduced definition is, that the more complex your methods are, the higher the cyclomatic complexity. A high complexity results from many different paths the program can take while running your code. Many conditionals (if/else) or branches in your code lead to higher complexity.

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If you paint a fence, you need to make sure to prepare the wood. Take coarse-grained sandpaper and sand the old paint. You have to take it off the wood completely. Once you are done with it, you should use a primer and put it onto the wood. Let it dry for a few hours. After the primer has dried, you take your color and apply it thinly. Let it dry for another 6 hours. The next step is to apply the color again and let it dry again. Afterward, you can decide whether you need protective paint/lacquer, to guard against weather conditions. That depends on your location.

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Do you know the term technical debt? Wikipedia describes it as “a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt) This is certainly a correct definition, but there’s more to it. We’ll get to that shortly.

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If you read these letters for a few issues, you might have already noticed that I like quality in software engineering. I try to optimize for quality and enhancing the quality of a project leads to more successful projects and more satisfied clients. If you care for the quality it can lead to situations where you have to stand your ground to achieve the goal of increasing the quality (or your processes or your products). Because doing high-quality work also increases the costs of a project. And it’s rare that managers don’t care for the cost of a project.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The other week I went on vacation with my family. We flew to Switzerland and had a really great time. I took the big camera to make gorgeous shots of my wife, my baby daughter and the Alps. The iPhone camera is great but pales in comparison to a professional camera. As I am no great photographer you can see this in every shot. But still, the pictures I made with the DSLR are just better. When using a big camera I always try to take more time for the composition of the shot. I use the lens, different focus spots and depth of field way more than when shooting with my phone.

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