25 August 2009

Sharing your knowledge

Why are developers, and people in general , so prone to entropy? Most of the software developers I know are really quick to throw aways good engineering practices in favor of writing more code. And use the same code writing exercise as an excuse of not doing those practices in the first place.
I have to much work to do! See, how many bugs I have to fix! What do I get from writing all these down, nobody will read that! Testing is stupid, I will be the only one doing it , everyone else doesn't do it!
Oh , how many such sentences I've heard from everyone I talked to. And the energy I spent correcting each and different attitude. Ah! And then to see them fall back to their evil no engineering ways, practically makes me wonder why do I try.
OK, I try , because I really want to teach others what I know and think that should be a practice for all experienced developers, only this way our profession will grow and evolve. I do not gain anything by not sharing and teaching others.
What are the benefits of sharing (for example with your team mates):

  • You can shuffle boring and uninteresting work to them, while you focus on more challenging stuff


  • You can discuss problems with someone who understands the topic , and possibly made some learning on their own


  • You learn by teaching


  • People around you will write code with greater quality


Teaching others , or sharing knowledge , has its drawbacks :

  • Time spent teaching others is not time spent on improving you

  • Teaching others (in my experience) often diminishes your knowledge in the eyes of others , since for them is so easily gained

  • Teaching is a strenuous and continuous process with unknown results (if you want to see big bangs for you bucks quickly, better be ready for disappointment)


And the greatest truth of all: you can't force people to really learn and implement that they are not interested in. Especially if you do not a rifle on their heads.

24 August 2009

Back to work

'm nervous, really nervous. For the last two weeks I was at home, resting and relaxing on my hard earned holiday. These were the first totally relaxed two weeks of holiday in , I think, more then five years. And now, today, I'm going back to work. And I'm so nervous. Really.

For the past two weeks I haven't studied anything related to the field of Software Engineering. Instead I spent my time with my son Sven and my wife Tijana, I read fantasy novels (Steven Erikson “The Bonehunters”) and prepared a 4E D&D quest for my wife and our two friends. In short I was a lazy bug in all. Now is time to go to work and enter the grinding machine of stress, constant learning, long hours and impossible deadlines (no deadline is impossible, it is just impossible what you want to do in that time span with the resources you have).

How do I cope with this emotion? Well I woke early, I restarted my morning pilates exercises, opened a DNR TV video for Windows Workflow Foundation. During lunch break I will read “Software Engineering” 8th edition, and will begin a new practicing advanced ASP.NET 3.5 in hopes of one day continue with WCF, WPF and F#.

Will I succeed? Will I be my old self and continue my work as usual? Or will I fall victim to laziness and the eternal question: Which is best, fighter or wizard?

11 August 2009

Second Opencoffe Istra meeting

The second Istrian Open Coffee meeting will be held on Saturday 15th at 18:00 hours at the “Cvajner” caffe on the ancient roman square of Pula, on the tip and shorelines of Istra, the greatest peninsula of world. Come and join your fellow developers with excellent coffee, free Internet wireless connection and exhilarating talk about everything web development, web design, business and marketing on the web. Everything goes, as long is remotely related to the web.

To find out more please join the Opencoffee Istra group. There is no shortage of people willing to help a fellow web enthusiast.

A special call is made to all web designers or front end engineers out there. On the last meeting the tip of the scale went to the developer, business side of things. The present web designers felt a bit alone with their tags, photoshops and animated gifs (or should I say flashy thingis). If you are a web front-end enthusiast your are more then welcome on out next gathering.

Do not forget, the next meeting will be held on the 15th of August, at the “Cvajner” caffee in Pula on the ancient roman forum .

07 August 2009

Document first , document later

There is a great debate in my head, what is best – to document first , or to document latter. The wanna be engineer in my head would scream “Document first!”, but my practical side, the one that has been into the trenches, that has seen things, horrible things would say “Document later!”. How to reconcile those two opposing views?

Documents can be generally be placed into two broad categories, those that are:

  • Generally written before development

  • Generally written afterwards development


Why do I say Generally? Because in software development nothing is set in stone, and everything is fluid, thus documents cannot be said to have been written always before head or afterwards a piece of software is developed( class, module, library etc.) . A set of documents could be generally written before head, like requirements or the high level architecture, and some are generally written afterwards like in some cases detailed API technical specification.

What makes a document fall into one of the two general categories. Two things :

  • Type of document

  • Current state of the software life cycle


The Type of the document generally dictates when a software piece will be written. Like, requirements or the functional specification or something like that which is generally needed before a piece of software is written. And some which cannot be (or can, but albeit very hardly depending on the skill of the developer and the knowledge of the system), like detailed technical specification which is not ever accurate when written first and is ever (hopefully) updated once a particular piece of software is written.

The other most contributing factor is the current state of the software life cycle a team find its self in. When developing a green field software it is generally best to do the documentation first ( I'm not discussing waterfall here, you could develop module after module, and before each module write the technical documentation for it before going into development), but when a team finds it self knee deep in a brownfield development project, which generally doesn't have any documentation what so ever, which isn't even commented properly so you cannot generate an API spec automatically which is remotely useful to anyone, when you need to fix unknown defects, when you need to implement a piece of functionality and don't know how to place it inside the project and how it is to be connected to everything else, writing documentation first could be and exercise in futility since you don't know enough about the system. This will change gradually during brownfield development when you will reach a state where writing design documentation first would be a better choice in terms of quality of work and writing speed place into the construction of the document.

So, what to say to may two different parts? It depends. And that is the only answer I can give them, which places my little self once again on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to over thinking so simple things. But documentation is important, some cannot see that, but those cocky bastards will soon find them selves trying to remember how they did that, or where somebody placed this and how is generally this implemented and so on, and will loose valuable money debugging the thing out of its life in order to find something which would take five flimsy minutes to read. Who is stupid now, ha?!