2020 Archives

As a member of the software industry, I want user stories to focus more on the problem definition, so that we can make better choices around how to implement a solution.

Or should I say:

As a member of the software industry, it’s easy to decide on a solution or implementation details too quickly, without a good understanding of the problem we are trying to solve. This leads to suboptimal software for the end user, technical debt, and rework that could have been avoided. I propose that we change the user story format to focus more on the problem definition, and less on a single solution.

This is a short parable I came up while discussing linters, in response to someone asking if I think it’s good to be inconsistent.

Why use private at all? What is the benefit of trying to stop other people from using code that works perfectly well? It’s to reduce future maintenance costs by discouraging coupling to unstable dependencies.

Today I want to coin the term bleet. It’s a type of short-form writing somewhere between a blog post and a tweet.

I made a quick-and-dirty Ruby script that animates the GitHub contributions calendar, for the express purpose of making this satirical video: