Tag Archives: Developer

97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Advice from 97 experts combined in one book full of wisdom is the one-line summary for “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” by Kevlin Henney.

The book focusses on all aspects of software development.

The topics it covers are:

  • Bugs and fixes
  • Build and deployment
  • Code guidelines and code layout
  • Design principles and coding techniques
  • Domain thinking
  • Errors, error handling and exceptions
  • Learning, skills and expertise
  • Nocturnal and magical
  • Performance, optimization and representation
  • Professionalism, mindset and attitude
  • Programming languages and paradigms
  • Refactoring and code care
  • Reuse versus repetition
  • Schedules, deadlines and estimates
  • Simplicity
  • Teamwork and collaboration
  • Tests, testing and testers
  • Tools, automation and development environments
  • Users and customers

 

Junior Developers need a DoD-y!

Junior developers have a hard time to answer the question whether something is done. They need DoD-y!

It contains two elements they have not a lot of experience with: estimating the remaining time to complete (ETC) and knowing when something is completed according to the company’s standards.

Both will come with time and often they are not experienced enough to understand all aspects of the work yet. Scrum solves this by requesting the team to create a Definition of Done (DoD).

Below an example of what this could look like;

A DoD focusses on task decomposition. “How to eat elephant” … “bit by bit”!

If you get an understanding on what to do, the estimation of the time needed will become easier as well.