Where do we go from here?

I will soon be made redundant from a job I’ve held for 6 years. Thats the longest I’ve ever been anywhere. The last time I found myself without a job, I was terrified. How will I keep a roof over my family’s head? What if I couldn’t ever find another job? The fear of the unknown […]

The Worst Guy in the Band

In Chad Fowler’s wonderful Passionate Programmer book (which you should buy), theres a chapter called “Be the Worst”. Legendary jazz guitarist Pat Metheny has a stock piece of advice for young musicians, which is “Always be the worst guy in every band you’re in” Chad spins this musical advice into advice for programmers. Being the worst […]

Link: How Designers Destroyed The World

Webstock ’13: Mike Monteiro – How Designers Destroyed the World

Link: Yosemite

I’m really excited to be going to Cocoaconf Yosemite. Aside from the giant, anonymous WWDC this is the first conference I’ve attended rather than organised in nearly ten years.

My pencils are sharp enough

Its time I started blogging again. I’ve had several over the years and usually end up deleting them after a while. I used MovableType, and Ghost and Blosxom and Jekyll and all sorts of other tools. Twitter really killed it for me. It made it easier to throw out a thought than to sit down a […]

Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns

the best programming book I’ve ever read

Acceptance Testing Classes

I have seen a lot of unit tests in my 10 years as an XP practitioner and coach. I have also had a lot of debates about styles of unit testing. The longest running of these debates is about the role of “mock objects” in TDD. Martin Fowler has characterised the use of mocks as […]

Dials to Eleven

Movements arise in context. For people to gather around a shared social, artistic or aesthetic ideal, they usually need some other social ‘norm’ to distinguish themselves from. Movements are as much about what they’re against as what they’re for. Now, that context may not be responsible for the birth of the idea, but I think […]

Redefining Simple

One of the main tenets of Extreme Programming is that we should strive to produce ‘simple code’. Sometimes code is written simply from the outset, other times code needs to be refactored until it is simple. In either case, it’s necessary to have a working definition of simple to code or refactor to. Luckily, XP […]

Thinking Tools

Extreme Programming is pretty silent on how features (which we call UserStories) are gathered. It only speaks to how those features are scheduled and planned. This is often considered a hole in the process. When sitting with a client, figuring out what XP will mean to them and how it maps to their current process, […]