Not your father's IDE

IDE’s and Dynamic Languages. Ted Leung’s got some useful and insightful things to say about dynamic languages, history, IDEs and the people who use them. While I still think many of the features in a modern IDE are crutches, I hope that what Ted is alluding to becomes a reality.

Failings of the expert's mind

Why Analytical Applications Fail. Ostensibly, this article is about analytics applications that expect users to know exactly what they want before they start. But to me, the underlying story is of developers who get caught up in their domain and build an application for themselves instead of for their users.

We’ve all fallen into this trap. Whenever a new person joins my team, I always try not to squander their beginner’s mind. Fresh team members can often point out places where the interaction design or domain model need to soften up for those who haven’t lived in the project for months. That said, it requires patience and humility on the part of the existing team.

You say simple, I say simple

The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work:

At first the developer said "this is where we're going to disagree on the simplest thing that could possibly work." He argued that we were backing ourselves into a corner by not following the pattern; therefore, what I was suggesting couldn't possibly work. I took a few moments to consider his point of view. I concluded that he might be right, but deleting 60% of the code we were currently working with meant that the remaining 40% was so small that if we did need to rewrite in the future it would actually be easier than the amount of effort required to maintain the prematurely put in place architecture.

Jay Fields is Sage.