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 software...

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.