Category: Craftsmanship
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Refactoring (Mis)understood
People refer to all kinds of changes to existing code as refactoring, which is a common case of semantic diffusion. Like many terms in software development, “refactoring” is often used very loosely by practitioners. Martin Fowler Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code (p. 45).Pearson Education. Kindle Edition. If you…
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Not an Acronym
People in the tech industry infamously like acronyms. So much indeed that they sometimes turn perfectly normal words into something that looks like an acronym or initialism. The following list contains words that I’ve often seen used as if they were acronyms, possibly because their actual meaning wasn’t known or…
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Clean Code is Not a Style Guide
The term is sometimes used to refer to a specific and opinionated way of writing code, the one described in the popular book “Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin. That book is now over 15 years old, and it contains some good advice along with lots of debatable, dogmatic and…
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Code Review Best Practices Revisited
In the past, my advice for effective code reviews was something along the lines of: Nowadays, after years working (more or less voluntarily) with pull requests, and sometimes without, this has changed quite a bit. My advice is now:
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Taste Your Own Soup
Imagine this scenario: A restaurant cook learned from their grandmother the secret of her tasty soup. “Always put a tablespoon of salt in your soup”. And so they follow the advice, every day, no exception – and the customer reviews are, well, not great. “Disgusting”, says a food critic in…
Raimund Krämer 