Start with one thing at a time. Do that one thing excellently until it becomes part of your soul, and you could never imagine not doing it. Then move onto the next thing.
Yes, Agile does produce more buggy, less stable software. There is heavy bias towards doing only simplistic, user-visible things that fit in the span of two weeks. So all the foundational stuff you need to put in at the start of the project to let you support features while reliably turning direction on a dime? Can’t put it in there.
I’ve seen many agile shops fail to ever get CI/CD working because the effort just couldn’t find a place and a schedule on the backlog.
> they were demanding something in a timeframe that I couldn't deliver it without ensuring that there wouldn't be any unintended side effects - and then blaming me for the side effects when they came up.
Far too few developers understand: just because the people writing the checks ask you to do it and you implemented it exact as they ordered you to doesn't mean the people writing the checks will take responsibility for the resulting bad situations that can lead to them not writing you checks anymore. If anything, you'll be used as a scapegoat to prevent them from not getting any more checks written.
A CTO of an American company, to get a bonus of $7 million, lays off a ton-load of the company’s CRM people who knew how 20 years of architecture duct tape that ran the company was strung together.
CTO then proceeds to hire a cheap, offshoring body shop to design the company’s new website, which talks to the CRM. However, there’s no more CRM people at the American company because they’ve all gotten laid off and the offshore web contractors also now have to become customized CRM experts, which is insane scope creep.
The outsourcing company can’t deliver and litigation is sought, while the US company takes zero responsibility for the fact that all the CRM people were let go and there’s no chance in hell that web developers at the outsourcing can ever learn the highly customized domain-specific logic that fast that extensively. Meanwhile, CTO gets fired and a severance of $1 million for all the extreme damage he did to the company.
And that’s Hertz vs Accenture, or at least how I heard it to be.
If simplicity is always the right solution, then why do so many programming languages have dedicated parsing libraries for .csv, which has to be the world’s most simplest data format ever?
CSV isn’t so much “simple” as “underspecified”. Sure, Comma separated values, but what happens when a value contains a comma? It emerges that people normally use quoted strings ‘"a,b"’ for that, but then what do you do when you need to include quote characters in your values? Etc. etc.
The basic rule for CSV is: Don’t. Or at least use a library which emits RFC 4180-compatible results. If you need to parse some co-called “CSV” non-RFC-compatible monstrosity, do whatever you need to parse it, but don’t have any illusions of it being in any way “standard”.
This is the problem with “artificial simplicity” – people make systems too simple, so the abstractions leak heavily, and by the time you want to get anything done you have a massive pile of leaked complexity to wade through.
Scrum allows for granular micro-tracking of developers at a daily level while sanctifying the ideas of developers as interchangeable cogs and that leaderships should be able to move the goalposts at the last minute.
Well said. It's funny how Scrum was sold to developers as a way to "empower" dev teams, but more often than not it simply encourages micromanagement and poor planning.
