#teamwork

I've found that talking about tech debt is a favourite subject among developers (especially if the developer responsible for introducing that tech debt is no longer on the project 😉). However, often talk is all that happens. As with any potentially ambiguous and daunting task it is easier to talk about it than to actually do it. In this post I want to explore some of the roadblocks that can come up during these tech debt discussions, what the motivations for those roadblocks could be and how we can overco…

Anyone who has ever worked in a team knows only too well that there is no such thing as one true way of formatting code. Everyone has their own way of formatting and provided it compiles, all of those formatting choices are valid. So when it comes to formatting, it really is a personal choice based on some aesthetic. Often one of the first questions I ask when joining a new team is: "Can I see the coding style guide?" However, even when there is a style guide and I've read and followed it, I wi…

Firefighters are portrayed, quite rightly, in our society as heroes. They courageous run into dangerous situations and save people. However, let's think about why we need firefighters. We need firefighters because our man-made environment has been built up over hundreds (or even thousands) of years, by many different hands with differing ideas on what's important. This legacy of inconsistent design, coupled with our differing attitudes to fire safety has meant that we need a professional fire service in co…