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Evolve
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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Frustration
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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How to train for a marathon
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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Measure it
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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Code quality & security audit
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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One metric
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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Let the computer help you with that comment
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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Time well spent
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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Don't build a five-star hotel
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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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:
- 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…