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January 29, 2019 ouarzy Book

The Road Less Traveled

“Confronting and solving problems is a painful process which most of us attempt to avoid. And the very avoidance results in greater pain and inability to grow both mentally and spiritually”. Does it remember you something? Root cause analysis, Domain Driven Design and so many practices in IT are about solving the problems instead of fixing the consequences. Actually, I think it’s the difference between a young and an experienced developer. The young dev wants to hack a solution as fast as possible. The experienced dev will use this time to analyze the problem, because when it is done correctly, building the solution will be “trivial”.
The passionate thing about The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck is that it’s a book written by a passionate psychiatrist, drawing heavily on his own professional experience. It’s all about human relationships, and the incredible number of lessons from this book we can directly apply in our software developer job should be a huge warning for people arguing that we must be technical monkey.

Discipline

Seems familiar again? That’s the very first section of his book. Through different experiences he explained how discipline is important to grow as an adult, and how most of us stay children. Each time we refuse responsibilities, each time we look for the easy solution instead of a more permanent one, each time we take a direct gratification instead of investing in a delayed but greater one, we are acting like children. This book brings us this hard truth: being an adult is not fun, and nobody will help or prepare you to become one. But fleeing our responsibility results in pain. That’s why discipline is required to grow as an adult, even if it hurts.

Love

This one is a bit far away from software development, but important for mind growing. In a nutshell, the author tries to define love: true genuine love. Not the one you think to know when you’re 16 years old and discover the opposite sex. True genuine love is the unconditional love we have for our children for instance. This kind of love does not require anything from the loved one, it does not have to be mutual. It’s just something you give to someone. This kind of love is hard, and usually not what we’re used dealing with. It excludes the myth of “love at first sight”, because genuine love requires a deep understanding and respect of the loved one. The author explains that this kind of love is the one that can stand for life.

Religion and Grace?

The two other sections use some words that make me very careful… Religion, Grace… I believed this psychiatrist was a scientific man? But the reading was still really pleasant. The author is not trying to convince you of anything (even if he personally believed in god, or at least in something bigger than us). Again, he drew on his experience to relate some stories were religion drive people crazy. And some stories were these same religions literally save people. And grace is about all these things that we observe but can’t explain. What’s the link with psychiatry and psychology? Well, to be happy you need to accept that you won’t understand the world.

Yet another must read

It will not be the book that will make you a better developer technically. But we can feel the passion of the author through chapters, and his feedback on human relationships are priceless. It helps me to realize how much the job of a software developer is driven by people’s relationships, more than by anything else.

I highly recommend it.

December 6, 2018 ouarzy Other

I did often fail

I like to read technical blogs. I do it daily since a few years now, and I really enjoy the way in which this community is sharing in order to improve. I would argue that it’s an efficient way to raise the bar of the software industry. There is one thing I regret though: we almost never talk about our failures. We talk about concepts, implementations, and how we think the industry can be better. But we very rarely share about our failures. I do meet failure more often than success. I think it’s a good idea to share about it, because people who read us without working with us may think that we are kind of “super developers”. We are not. Let’s talk about how we fail and why.

When the pressure comes back

I’m bad to work under pressure. I mean like really bad. My brain is just in panic mode and seems to hide data from myself when I’m stressed. I can physically feel the pain when I try to focus in this situation.I have no way to clear out my ideas, my mind goes in many directions and I almost systematically miss obvious stuff. The usual result is that I push code I should never have committed (like code I changed “just for test”), and/or that I need lots of time to sort out simple problems. In this situation, I may bypass some quality practices because you know… We’re in a hurry!

Where does this pressure comes from?

In ten years, I learned to say no, thus it generally does not come from other people. It’s usually my own commitment due to my own estimation. And in ten years I learned to be very careful about my estimation.I know that unexpected things happened all the time. And still, the pattern is almost always the same. First I commit to a deadline that seems correct to me.Then I’m not as fast as expected, and I feel like I lose time on trivial stuff.Finally, I feel guilty that it takes “so long” for this “trivial” thing. I feel like it’s “almost done” and work extra hours in order to finish it. I see the pressure growing. At some point, I bypass some quality practices (no one is here to validate my pull request after 8 pm anyway… And do I really need this test? This piece of code seems so simple…)

Consequences

The consequences are most often the same. The few hours of extra work cost me a few hours/days to fix it. My colleagues usually look at the PR in the morning, and it took them a few minutes to spot my mistakes. That was the cost of my extra work. That is how productive I am when I work 10 hours a day.

A developer with good practices

It reminds me this truth from Kent Beck I know for a while: I’m not a great developer, I’m a developer with great habits. Losing these habits make me much less efficient. And even after 10 years as a software developer, it’s still easy for me to discard these practices.

Being a code crafter is a continuous challenge.

July 30, 2018 ouarzy Tips

Migrating Database from ClearDB to MySQL for WordPress in Azure

You know this feeling when something that should take an hour finally take a day? That’s what happens to me when I tried to move my database from ClearDb (because it’s no longer included in the MSDN subscription). I wanted to use the free MySQL in App instance instead, and I wasn’t able to find a simple and complete guide for that. Hopefully this one will avoid some pain to some people.

About ClearDb and MySQL in App

ClearDb is a Saas service for MySql database. They used to host the WordPress azure app service. But now we have to pay for it as it’s no longer included in the MSDN subscription. An alternative is to use the free MySQL in App database provides by azure with app services. Beware that this Database is normally for testing purpose, they are not recommended for production. But for a WordPress site hosting a blog like mine, I think we should be fine.

Let’s save everything

The first action to do is to save your website (Just in case :)):
YourApp -> Settings -> Backup

The second action to do is to save your Data from ClearDb. The easiest way I found was to activate MySQL In App:
YourApp -> Settings -> MySQL In App

Click on “activate”. Then you would be able to click on “manage” in the upper left corner. It will open your php MyAdmin UI for your web app. You normally have (at least) two server available in the server list in the upper left corner. One is for your ClearDb database, the other one is for the localDb from your MySql In App.

You can select the ClearDb server, select your WordPress database, and use the export button to get a sql script from your DB schema and Data.
Now you can select the MySQL In App server (localhost), and use the existing localDb, then import the sql script that you get from the ClearDb database.

Reroute WordPress to the new Database

Last but not least, you need to change the wp-config file from the WordPress site to use the new MySqlApp database.
Go to https://[yourwebsite].scm.azurewebsites.net/ to see your Kudu UI. Using the Debug console, you will find your wp-config file in: D:\home\site\wwwroot.
You need to change the following values:

define('DB_NAME', ‘localdb’);
define('DB_USER', ‘azure’);
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password’);
define('DB_HOST', ‘127.0.0.1:port’);

To know the value for the connection you can check the ConnectionString for the My SQL App in D:\home\data\mysql\MYSQLCONNSTR_localdb.txt
It should looks like this:
Database=localdb;Data Source=127.0.0.1:port;User Id=azure;Password=password
Just extract your database name, user id, data source (host) and password.
Note that you need to precise the port for the host.

Cleanup

You can now remove the ClearDb connection string from the app service:
Settings -> application settings, connection strings
And of course stop your potential ClearDb subscription!

Hope it helps.

May 15, 2018 ouarzy DDD

How do you teach DDD?

The more I work using Domain Driven Design in my daily job, the more I face how hard it is to teach. What’s the matter here? Why is DDD so often misunderstood? Of course, we can just consider that it’s a complex thing, hence requiring lots of knowledge and practices to be mastered. But let’s be more constructive and try to find the root problem in the domain of DDD teaching.

Like always, we need to agree on the terms we’ll use through this post.

Reminder: DDD

DDD is about tackling the complexity of the domain in the heart of software. It means that, in an ideal world, your software must be as complex as the problem it’s solving. Plus, the problem you solve must be the most valuable possible thing for your company. DDD provides patterns to address these points (spoiler alert: it’s not an easy task). Implementing DDD is all about analyzing dependencies.

Reminder: Tactical patterns

Tactical patterns are the most concrete parts for us developers because it’s about code! It’s a set of technical tools to concretely apply a DDD approach where it matters the most. These patterns evolve quickly, at the same speed as good practices. A well-known example is the repository pattern. Tactical patterns help to know how to build each part of a business.

Reminder: Strategic patterns

Strategic patterns are more abstract. They allow to categorize the domain (the business) into subdomains, in order to know how to build context of applications around it. Each context has a specific common business language (the ubiquitous language) and use precise way to communicate. Does a context impose things to another context? Do they share a kernel? How do they communicate? All of this can be captured using strategic patterns. They help to know what the different parts of the business are, and how they interact.

The DDD usual problems

Since I start studying DDD in 2012, I meet two recurrent problems.
The first is that newcomers (including me) do not know where to start. They can feel DDD is huge, but the reference books are intimidating. The community of smart peoples using words you never heard before seems nice, but you feel so stupid around them that it’s hard to stay.
The second one is that most people (yep, was me again) will not grab the duality of strategic versus tactical patterns at first glance. Worse, they may stay focus on the tactical patterns because they seem more concrete. We already know some of them, like factories or layered architecture. The consequence could be that we overlook the strategic patterns.

Root cause analysis

Following the principles of good design, how can we improve DDD so that these mistakes are harder to make for newcomers? Let’s use my (almost) secret silver bullet for that.
In my domain of DDD teaching, I believe there are two sub domains: one is about tactics, the other is about strategies.
An efficient implementation for teaching DDD would map one bounded context for strategic patterns, and one context to for tactical patterns. We have several clues to justify this implementation.
First clue: different languages. The two contexts have specific ubiquitous language.
Second clue: different life cycle. Tactical patterns evolve quickly. Most of the patterns from the blue book can be replaced by more recent patterns like CQRS/ES or hexagonal architecture. Strategic patterns are much more durable.
Third clue: the level of abstraction is not the same in both contexts.
Last clue: the strategic context is much more important. It’s my core domain, the core values I want to share when teaching DDD. There is a clear dependence between my contexts. Tactical patterns are important but will bring much less value if I teach them alone.
I now have a part of the answer about why DDD is hard to teach: it mixes two very different contexts. Both are useful, one is more central than the other, but also more abstract, hence harder to understand.

Solution attempt

Eric was really ambitious in his attempt to improve the industry, providing both strategic and tactical views. I think the trending and the emergence of major DDD conferences across the world are proofs that he succeeds. I also understand his willing to provide something that is not only abstract, to avoid the architect ivory tower syndrome.
Still, strategic and tactical patterns are really different beasts. These two faces of DDD make it harder to understand.
How can we manage this complexity? It depends on the context (did you see that coming?). But in the domain of teaching DDD for newcomers, I would accentuate on strategic patterns, mainly bounded context, because this is the pattern that can lead to all other patterns. Then I would explain that all the industry standards good practices (continuous integration, segregation of responsibility and so on…) are mandatory to implement the core domain, and that DDD also includes them under the name tactical patterns.
Trying to go the other way around (teaching the tactical part as introduction to DDD) increases the risk of missing the core concepts.

As always, it’s not a recipe, but it may be a way to facilitate the understanding of DDD.

April 23, 2018 ouarzy Functional Programming

The context of OOP and FP

If you want lots of reaction when you tweet, a sure recipe is to talk about Object Oriented Programming (OOP) vs Functional Programming (FP).

Let’s throw the cat among the pigeons, with another blog post on the Internet giving personal perspective on OOP vs FP. I’m far from being a functional expert. I code professionally mainly in C#, and sometimes in F#. I only play with Haskell and Idris in coding dojo. I’m not trying to convince anyone about anything. I just would like to share my thoughts about these two important paradigms.

And the first step would be to agree on what’s OOP and what’s FP.

What’s OOP?

To really grasp the philosophy, I highly encourage you to follow Alan Kay’s work. Of course, he’s not the only one behind this paradigm, but I find his explanations really clear. This keynote is a good start. In a nutshell, Alan has (beyond other knowledge) a PHD in biology. The way complex organisms are working is basically what inspired the OOP paradigm. In other words: collaboration through specialize components to achieve a complex task. Each component can be independent and don’t need to be aware of the full system. They just collaborate, receiving some messages when something was required from them, and sending messages when they have done something meaningful for the system. How these components communicate, and how the orchestration between them is managed is not imposed by the paradigm. And different languages have used different implementation. But this notion of independent component collaboration is the core concept of OOP. Not really what we see when we type OOP in duckduckgo…

What’s FP

Instead of looking for inspiration in the biological field, Functional Programming is rooted in mathematics. I’ll quote Philip Wadler to give a better definition:
“A program in a pure functional language is written as a set of equations. Explicit data ﬂow ensures that the value of an expression depends only on its free variables. Hence substitution of equals for equals is always valid, making such programs especially easy to reason about. […] Explicit data ﬂow also ensures that the order of computation is irrelevant, making [functional] programs susceptible to lazy evaluation.”
What does he means? If I write X = A+B, or Y = C * D I don’t care about the values of A and B, or C and D. That’s a mathematical equation, it represents the concept of all the valid values for an addition of type A and B, or a multiplication of type C and D. Hence I can compose X with Y, and do substitution:
X>>Y = (A + B) >> Y = X >>( C * D) = (A + B) >>( C * D)
(>> is the composition operator in F#)
If any of these values have the possibility to change (mutate) outside of my scope, all this reasoning is no longer true. Even worse if not only the values, but also the types can change. That’s why we say that in FP, we can write code only thinking locally. I know that my “equations” (or pure functions) are always true, no need to think about the rest of the world to ensure that.
Please note that this willing of “local thinking” can also be find in the “independent components” from OOP. But contrary to OOP, FP explains how it can be achieved, thanks to mathematics.

Which one is the best?

Finally, the answer the whole industry was looking for since many years. Here it is: none of them, because this is not the good question. The question should be: which one is the best in my context? And now we can start to talk. I think the answer is easier that what many believe.
The more constraints you have, the harder it is to write code that woks, the easier it is to maintain the code in the long term. What are code constraints? We have many of them depending on the language: syntax, immutability, no side effects, unit tests, types and dependent types for example. Is it better to write code faster or to have long term maintainable code? In a start-up context, I probably need to produce code quickly, until I find the good product. In a critical context where lives are involved, I probably want something robust, even if I need 1 year to write it. And of course, there are all the scales from “quick and dirty” to “mathematically robust” that might be your context.

Just tools

Functional Programming is by nature more constrained than Object Oriented Programming. Because it forbids mutability and side effects. When the language also uses types, it leads to powerful concept like Type Driven Development where we can, by design, remove the invalid states from our system, to make it more robust at runtime. And when the language also uses dependent types, we can even encode business rules into the types, to avoid compilation if a business rule is not met. As a drawback, it is harder to write. But when you achieve to write it, you can trust the famous quote “if it compiles, it works”. Maintaining this code is usually easier than a huge OO codebase, because thanks to pure functions we can use local reasoning to maintain the system. Please note the “usually” in my previous sentence. A “good” OO codebase can in theory have this property of local thinking, but the fact that side effects and global impact are not forbidden by design makes it almost impossible to scale (at least in my experience).

FP is hard to write, but easy to maintain (easier to reason about). OOP is easier to write, but harder to maintain (harder to reason about due to side effect).

April 13, 2018 ouarzy Book

Remote

This book is the second-best seller by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. I’ve already commented the first one. It was basically one of the most pleasant reading experience I had so far, in terms of presentation. Knowing that they have written a book about remote working, I had it in my reading list since a while. As a remote worker myself, I was sure to learn stuff, or at least to discover another pleasant book to read.

William Zinsser’s touch

Like for Rework, we feel the hard work in this book to write only essential things, in the most comprehensive way. From the writing style to the chapters patterns and the images to illustrate them, we feel that nothing was chosen by coincidence.
The result is again a delightful experience.

Content

Thanks to this writing style, clear and concise, the chapters follow each other with lots of takeaways. Short and actionable things you can do tomorrow, either as an employee or as a company, if you want to use and promote remote working.
There are also many arguments about why remote working makes sense, from a human and economical perspective. Including counter arguments to explain the challenges that arise with remote working.

Favourites takeaways

– You can work remotely just a few days per week, or even per month, it doesn’t need to be all or nothing
– Just staying in front of a computer is not working, the work is what matters wherever you are
– A demotivated remote employee is also demotivated on site
– On site or at home, we need a routine to perform
– It’s all about trust in the end

Should you read it?

If you are a remote worker or a company working with remote workers, this book will definitely be helpful. This is also true if you are interested by remote working, but don’t know where to start.
If you want to learn how to write a book which is a pleasure to read, this is a must read as well.

Have a good read!

March 22, 2018 ouarzy Other|Tips

Breaking people

An interesting discussion including Yannick Grenzinger, Romeu Moura and Daniel Gonçalves has recently happened on Twitter. Thanks mates for the respectful and enlightening exchange.

It started from this:

The first objection was from Yannick Grenzinger:

Which, as Daniel Gonçalves noticed, resonates a lot with an older tweet from Nicole Rauch:

I think the matter deserves a blog post to explain my position. Not because it’s the right position, but rather because we all have different experiences, with interesting things to share. I kind of agree with Nicole, and still I think we can survive it, if we stop trying to fix the system.

What’s breaking people?

The first step is to agree on what it means to “break people”. I was once, when I started my career.
We feel broken when we lost interest in what we are doing. When we stop trying to improve, because it seems excessively hard. We know that something better could be done. But we feel that whatever we can do will not have any meaningful impact. First, we lost our motivation, then our discipline, and finally our values.
Because what we can do doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter either way if we don’t write a unit test for this code, or if we don’t take the time to refactor it. It doesn’t matter if the build is broken or if there isn’t any automatic build. It doesn’t matter if we ship bad software for unhappy users. That’s because of the corporation, not because of us. They want us to ship too fast. They want us to write crappy code. They recruit only juniors. They don’t care about code quality and good software. They don’t want to hear about pair programming. They just consider the IT as a cost centre. If they don’t want to change and see the world like us, there’s nothing we can do.

The global local impact

I’m a firm believer that you don’t change the world by imposing your view. You change the world by acting locally and leading by example. That’s exactly how I understand Gandhi’s mantra “You must be the change you want to see in the world”.
When I do consulting for a company, no matter how big it is, I start by acting locally. Of course, it would be easier to act globally. It would be easier if the whole company, at all levels, will follow the agile principles at once. But it never happens to me. And who am I to know the correct way of working for the whole company? I don’t know. What I know is how to write software efficiently. What I know is that it doesn’t belong to any managers to choose if we must write unit tests, or if we should use a build server and do code reviews.
Whatever the context is, I can keep my discipline and my values, which are mandatories to stay motivated.

But the system will break you!

Fair enough, that could happen, but at one condition. Only if I fail to recognize the moment when the “system” is creeping into my local safe area. I did this mistake once, and it won’t happen again.
Since then, when I do recognize this moment, I do whatever is possible to protect the safe area. The last possible solution is to abandon it and let it collapse.
Is it a big deal? Absolutely not. Our team could fail, our product could be shitty in the end, our company could re-create a command and control culture, but I (and the people convinced by my example) will be safe. Because we will leave and find another place where the culture is less corrupted, where it will be possible to manage a full project, at least locally, with our discipline and values.

So you’re just a coward?

I always clearly explain how I work during interviews. My behaviour will never be a surprise, as I clearly state that some practices are not optional for me to work.
Anybody who has already quit a gig or a job know how hard it is. Like every other passionate people, I have strong feelings about my job. And it takes lots of courage to admit that we’re no longer in the capacity to protect our local safe zone. It’s a failure. It is the proof that we couldn’t change enough people around us. But it doesn’t mean that we must abandon our discipline and values. It just means that we must abandon this toxic context, to find a better one.

How do you change anything if you left when it’s hard?

As it happens, lots of companies are looking hard for competent developers, with strong skills, discipline and values. It explains why, in 10 years of professional software development, I only need once to quit such a toxic environment. Since, I’ve always found some places where my discipline and values are much welcome.
I didn’t change any system so far, but I’ve done more important things. I’ve influenced the way of working of several people, in such a way that broken systems were no longer able to break them.

Changing things is not as important as changing people. From the latter, the first will happen.

November 22, 2017 ouarzy Other

Release your Soft Power

A few weeks ago, an interesting discussion arises on twitter (in french, sorry for my foreign readers).
In a nutshell, it all started from a (french) post by Arnaud Lemaire about why he hates developers contest, where he explained that this kind of behaviour is infantile. Thomas Pierrain explains why he agrees, and it triggers a long thread with many french crafters about:
– Is the IT industry mature or not?
– What is our responsibility as developers?
– What is the responsibility of the company we are working for?
– Can we change an organisation to improve practices? Should we?

Of course, I don’t pretend to provide any answers to these fundamentals questions, but as usual twitter is not the good medium for long discussion (even if in this case the thread was really kind and friendly). I would like to summarize my comments here, in english to be more inclusive because I guess these topics could be interesting for many software crafters across the world.

Is the IT industry mature or not?

I won’t comment much this point because I already explained here why I think it’s not. I understand that everybody has not the same feeling about it, and it’s fine. In any case I think we can agree on the fact that there is a long living software crisis, which at least shows that we can still improve by an order of magnitude.

What is our responsibility as developers?

Our responsibility is to be professional, which means that we must be aware of the good practices in our industry, and up to date with them. There are technical good practices (unit testing, continuous integration…) and soft skills good practices (good communication, reach the business experts, empathy with users…). Most of us are aware of the former, few of us are aware of the latter. When you do apply both, you are no longer a simple blue-collar technician. You become a business involved people, you release your soft powers. You’ll more likely be part of the important decisions. I think it’s what Thomas means in this (french) keynote when he talks about “changing your developer posture”: take your full responsibility to reach your full power.

What is the responsibility of the company we are working for?

Of course it is also a bit controversial. What if the company I’m working for does not allow me to reach the business experts directly? What if I can’t see any users? What if they don’t even allow pair programming, or unit testing, or continuous integration? That is the point where the company does have a responsibility. And the first answer is: try to change it with a local change of the practices.

Can we change an organisation to improve practices? Should we?

In the twitter discussion, many people testified about the fact that you can’t change an organisation as a developer, because you’ll need managers support for that. I do agree, and I don’t care at the same time. I’m a huge fan of Gandhi on this matter: “Be the change you want to see in the world”. Why would you change a full organisation? It was here before you, it will stay after you, and it would be pretentious to suppose that you know better than them for their whole company. But, as a professional software developer, you do know how to manage the software you are working on. This is where you can (and must) have an impact: locally. If your team, and potentially a few teams around are convinced about these practices, it should be enough to live with. And it’s not such a big deal if the rest of the company is not aware of these practices. A local impact is about improving the software quality through technical practices, and your co-workers’ life through soft skills.

Last question

It now raises a last question: what if the company resists change? What if they explicitly refuse technical and soft skills good practices? In that case my advice is really simple: leave. The world is full of companies looking for competent and passionate people. Leave and work for them, or even better: work for yourself as an entrepreneur, to create a place where other passionate people will be happy to work.

November 12, 2017 ouarzy Book

The Computer Boys Take Over

Does it already happen to you that a book is so good that you can’t stop read it? I’ve experienced it a few times. For H2G2, the Lord Of the Rings or the Dark Tower for example. But for the first time it happens with an IT book: The Computer Boys Take Over.

Why it resonates with me: the short story

What’s the Software Crisis? Is it old? Why do we have so few women in IT? Why our job is still not understood? Why are we often in conflict with middle management? These questions are very recurrent in our industry. I heard them a lot in many conferences and blog posts. This book provides answers, or at least good insights about the roots of these problems.

IT history

Did you learn about IT history at school? I didn’t, and that’s a shame. Learning about the first decades of our industry (roughly 1950-1980) is full of lessons. Many of us believe that our job is mature. It isn’t. Our job exists since less than one Human life, and the computer industry is undergoing a fast-paced evolution. Most of us didn’t even remember what happens ten years ago. It would be both pretentious and dangerous to suppose that our industry is mature. This book does describe the beginning of IT, and shows clearly that the software evolution hasn’t happened yet. The fundamentals problems we had 30 years ago (projects running over time and budget, low quality, unmanageable software employees, lack of resources…) are still relevant today. I would even argue that it’s more relevant today than 30 years ago, because of the explosion of personal soft devices.

The coders diversity

The book explains well how we (deliberately or not) build a male oriented industry. From the lack of consideration of the first developers (women programming the ENIAC) to the IBM PAT (Programmer Aptitude Test) ravages and the will to overcome the “lack of software developers”, we have all the keys to understand how and why women were not welcome for such a long time (of course we’re not the only industry to suffer this problem, which is not a reason for ignoring it).

The challenge for the management

Since I’ve started to work as a professional, I’ve always felt uncomfortable with middle management and huge hierarchies. I just feel like it’s a waste, and I can’t understand the fact that “Excel-Managers” do need to express their authority on me. And by the way, how can they have authority on me without understanding what I’m doing? I read a lot of stuff about the “Y-generation” and experts trying to explain this fact. But this book also provides potential answers: what if software does remove the need for middle management from the classical Taylorist understanding of work? That would definitely create tensions between the middle managers and the software developers. That would also explain why it’s important for these managers to keep developers in a code monkey position. “Please code, don’t think. We are here to think and manage, you are here to code and obey.”

The representation of developers

Another discussion that I often have with other passionate developers is the lack of representation of our job. Should we create a union? An association? Who could have the legitimacy for that? Another question that this book tackles. It explains that this was already asked a few decades ago. That’s what lead to the creation of the ACM (Association For Computing Machinery) and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer). Most of us don’t know about them, and these associations have historical points of conflicts between the “pragmatic business programmers” and the “scientist software engineers”.

Software is hard to do

This book gave me many insights, and if you are a regular reader of this blog, you will probably recognize how it influences my recent thoughts about software. It helped me to have a deeper understanding of our industry, better than any other book before. Like always, I have now even more questions, which is the proof that this book is a must read for anybody with the will to understand the past in order to improve the future of the software industry.

PS: If you are wondering why such a great book has a title that may look sexist, please understand it is ironic. It highlights the fact that for many decades, these bunch of unmanageable weirdo nerds were referred as the “Computer Boys” (usually with a pejorative connotation).

November 4, 2017 ouarzy Book

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture is one of the many interested books written by Martin Fowler. I have a lot of respect for Martin, mainly because he’s able to constantly challenge himself and improve his craft, since several decades. Here is what I like and dislike about this book.

A bit hard to read

Like Eric Evans, Martin Fowler has tons of interesting things to say. Unfortunately, both have a style hard to read. Mainly because it is dense in terms of content, but also because it is not concise. Let me be clear: I don’t pretend by any way to be a better writer than them. I just consider what they write as much interesting as it is hard to read.

Not totally up to date

Because the book was written around 2000, with many technical details, some of the patterns described are no longer relevants. Which is not that bad, because it gives an historical perspective. For instance, it was released when OOP was kind of marginal, and patterns like ORM were not widely spread. It is interesting to see what were the alternatives, and how OOP was perceived before to be mainstream.

A must read stay a must read

This book has greatly influenced our industry in the last decades. From this perspective it is still valuable, because it helps to understand what IT looks like in the 2000s, and how it evolves. The book contains also some seeds of the original ideas behind the emergence of Domain Driven Design, such as the Domain Model pattern. It allows to understand the original link between Domain Model and OOP, and thus the influence of OOP in the mythical blue book by Eric Evans.

Thank you Martin for this book and what you do for IT since many years.