ArchiveJanuary 2012

When The Hammer Becomes More Important Than Driving Nails

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Back in the 1980s a few developers realized that common patterns appear in the code everybody was writing. They documented them in 1995 a famous book called [“Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”](). Today, many software teams have a guideline stating they must use design patterns. In early 1990s, one former US AirForce pilot became Chief Engineer of a...

5 Whys Shouldn’t Be 5 And Shouldn’t Be Whys

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Romanians have a class of jokes called “Radio Yerevan” jokes. My favourite one is: Is it true that Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov from Moscow won a car in a lottery? A: In principle yes, but: it wasn’t Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov but Aleksander Aleksandrovich Aleksandrov; he is not from Moscow but from Odessa; it was not a car but a bicycle; he didn’t win it, but it was stolen from him...

The case for tinkering

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When I was a boy the most common car in Romania was [Dacia](). Compared with modern cars, it is awful. It looks quite bad, you need a lot of force to steer it, putting it into reverse gear is a mix of force and accuracy and you are lucky if it starts when it’s cold outside. It requires a lot of maintenance or it will stop working. The bodywork erodes in a few years and it needs special...

alexbolboaca.ro Reflections on design, craft and software

A new home for merging ideas about design

It is my strong belief that software design can learn a lot from other design disciplines. I wrote blog posts, a book and did talks on this topic, and it was time to group them all together. These ideas have now a new home: https://codedesigner.eu. My plan is to add more blog posts there, and to involve other people doing work in this area.

Read My Book “Usable Software Design”

How UX techniques can be applied to software design to develop software better (given that the developer is the user of software design).

Read My Book “Coderetreat Hosting And Facilitating”

Learn how to facilitate and host a coderetreat from two of the most experienced coderetreat facilitators.