Back in Oslo at last. After an online edition of NDC Oslo in 2020 and the travel restrictions at the start of the Omicron wave in 2021, I haven’t been to Oslo for a while. Visiting in September is in many ways different from June. It is colder, and it gets dark early (around 7 …
Developers spend a lot more time on reading code than writing it. Therefore, if we want to get more effective, we must take a deep look at the reading part. In this Workshop Mark Seemann uses a set of heuristics to address the common obstacles developers face when it comes to understanding code. Keep in …
Last week I attended the “Make Your Code More Testable” workshop by Ted M. Young (@jitterted). I was not sure if I wanted to attend yet another workshop this year as I saw the first tweet about this workshop. After I saw the recommendations by Gitte Klitgaard, Esther Derby, Kent Beck and GeePaw Hill I …
Code katas are little exercises that help you to improve your programming skills. My favourite one is the Gilded Rose kata. It was originally created by Terry Hughes and is now maintained by Emily Bache (@emilybache). While most katas start from scratch, the Gilded Rose kata comes with existing code that you need to modify. …
Earlier this year I read the book The Mikado Method by Ola Ellnestam and Daniel Brolund. Whenever someone describes their process as a “pragmatic, straightforward, and empirical method to plan and perform non-trivial technical improvements on an existing software system” I get sceptical. Too many books claim that and deliver nothing. But this process is …
Form validation grows rapidly when we add more fields. Therefore, we need a different way to validate our forms than to put the validation logic into the view functions. This post is part of my journey to learn Python. You can find the other parts of this series here. A ViewModel for our form …
We all wanted to be in Norway for NDC Oslo 2020, but Covid-19 made that impossible. As with most other conferences in 2020, there was no way to make this an in-person event. The NDC crew and Dylan Beattie did their best to create the typical NDC feeling at an online-only conference. I was surprised …
When we refactor our code, we want to make it better. Not just a tiny bit better, a lot better. Therefore, we look at refactorings that change our code in big steps, like extract method or extract class. However, tiny little risk-free steps can bring us to insights that we miss otherwise. Sliding lines of …
Let’s talk about some of the more annoying habits many programmers have: the inability to delete code. Code is kept around as if their life depends on it, even when its purpose is long gone. They do all possible things so they don’t have to delete anything. They comment code out, put unreachable conditions around …
As experience shows the quality of code degrades slowly and before you know it will be an unmaintainable mess. To prevent this many practices where developed and have proven their usefulness over and over again: test automation, continuous integration and code analysis are just a few of them. Unfortunately those practices still require work and …