Have you ever thought about just how much time we software folk spend focused on the technologies we’re using, on implementation minutia, and on all of the shiny new solutions we should be using? Now contrast that with how often we stop to think about the whys? Why are we being asked to solve fizz-buzz-thing; do we understand the motivation and context behind the problem, or are we fixated on how we’ll build the solution? Are we asking why a problem occurred, or are we merely focused on how we fixed it, this time? Why...

In the software development vernacular the term YAGNI is often used as a device to put down attempts at prematurely adding functionality – things which are only speculatively required. This makes sense given that is basically the definition that Ron Jeffries and our XP forefathers came up with so long ago. Is that the whole story? In short, I don’t think so. I’ve long believed there was more to YAGNI than what had been canonically defined and was commonly understood. However, until recently I was never able to put my finger on what was missing. While...

That is a question I get quite a bit, albeit in a variety of different flavors, but the heart of the question is always the same. So, inspired a conversation with my friend Corey, and a certain talk from a recent Ruby Hoedown that he told me about, I decided to clear up the issue once and for all. And to make it perfectly clear, I decided to register some new URLs that are easy to remember: http://whenshoulditest.com http://howoftenshoulditest.com Go give them a read, I think you’ll get...

This week I was having a conversation with some fellow developers at the ALT.NET Open Spaces conference and an interesting topic came up. We were talking about vast amounts of time, mostly personal time, we spend trying to improve our skills and our craft. We spend time reading and writing blogs, books, mailing list messages, attending and giving talks, contributing to Open Source, and reading and writing code. We spend a huge number of hours in the quest for continuous improvement. Self-teaching is good We all agreed that self-teaching is important and we do it because we...