Do you feel that your source control system is working against you? Well, it might not be perfect, but maybe you’re just rubbing it the wrong way. I find that if you are a bit unstructured in your approach towards it, you can easily get into some unnecessary problems. And a little structure is all [...]

Tell, don’t ask is a way of thinking when you’re programming software, a mindset. It is something that should be in the back of your head every time you write a line of code, or a chunk of code that describes some functionality. It is not something you merely apply when trying to solve a [...]

It still surprises me, and scares me, how many people in our industry that just follow ideas and practices just because “someone” says it is the way to go, and how those same people do not understand why they are actually doing it.
Let me give you an example.
When Kent Beck and his extreme programmers started [...]

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When I refactor or make changes to code I need somehow to verify that the changes do not break anything. I want to do it with unit tests. Unit tests are my safety net. My philosophy on unit testing is something like, if you do not want me to change some of your [...]

One of the major reasons that our industry produces software that is full of bugs, with a massive cost of change and with a short life expectancy is that developers do not understand the importance of writing code that communicates. Yes, one of the most important aspects of software development is to write code that [...]

To make it clear: “Refactoring” (as the term made famous by Martin Fowler in his great book with the same name), means to change the code without changing its behavior. Too many people talk about refactoring when changing some of the behavior of a system. This interpretation is just plain wrong.
This distinction is not just [...]