The Motherland and IT
I hail from the depths of the northern wastelands of Sweden, one of the other Laplands where Santa does not live. Despite living abroad for more than a decade, I attempt to keep tabs on the motherland, of course, since I…
2025
Further on how time is wasted
I keep going on about why software development should consist of empowered cross-functional teams, and a lot of actual experts have written very well – at length – about this, and within manufacturing the Japanese showed…
Mob / Pair vs Solo and Speed
I have recently “thought led” on LinkedIn, claiming that the future of software development lies in mob programming. I think this take automatically flips my bozo bit in the minds of certain listeners, whilst for many pe…
Unix mail
E-mail used to be a file. A file called something like /var/spool/mail/username, and new email would appear by text being appended to that file. The idea was that the system could send notifications to you by appending m…
What Is and Should Never Be
I have been banging on about the perils of the Great Rewrite in many previous posts. Huge risks regarding feature creep, lost requirements, hidden assumptions, spiralling cost, internal unhealthy competition where the ne…
Are the kids alright?
I know in the labour market of today, suggesting someone pick up programming from scratch is akin to suggesting someone dedicate their life to being a cooper. Sure, in very specific places, that is a very sought after sk…
Why does code rot?
In popular parlance you have two categories of code: your own, freshly written code, which is the best code, code that never will be problematic – and then there is legacy code, which is someone else’s code, untested, un…
The sky is falling?
If you tried to do anything online today you may have had more problems than usual. All kinds of services were failing, because some storage at AWS on the eastern seaboard was having problems.…
Biscuits
What are cookies? Why do they exist? Why on earth would I ever NOT want to accept delicious cookies? What is statelessness? All that and more in this treatise on cookies and privacy.…
Busman’s Holiday
I used to spend time with automotively inclined gentlemen. There were two distinct schools of the car hobby at that time. Finbilsmek, e.g. renovating a classic car or preparing a race car – sure, it eats all your money i…
Development Productivity
Why the rush to measure developer productivity?…
Assembly and abstractions
Up until the 1980s, when you bought a computer, you occasionally needed to program it using machine code, i.e. directly feeding the processor instructions in its native instruction set. Programming language abstractions …
Death of Enterprise C# as we know it?
The constant battle between getting paid and getting a wide audience has simultaneously hit a number of formerly open source products in the .NET space as they move towards closed source paid licensing in future versions…
Barriers – trade and otherwise
The last few days of highly retro American foreign policy and the ensuing global market chaos has made everyone aware of trade barriers, and will make everyone fully grasp the consequences of a trade war, the same way th…