Category Archives: Blog

Notes from YOW! 2013: Hadi Hariri on ‘Refactoring Legacy Codebases’

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I attended Day 1 of YOW! Sydney 2013 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

A stack of stickers showing the word 'refactor' in a stylised, death-metal-like font.Hadi Hariri is a Developer and Technical Evangelist at JetBrains. He spoke at YOW! about refactoring legacy codebases.

Hadi started by offering reasons for refactoring:

  • increase the understandability of the code
  • decrease the impact of change
  • reduce the cost of change

He described how refactoring relies on culture: Continue reading →

Why You’ve Never Heard About Steve Jobs’ Skateboarding Prowess

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… and the secrets of 7 other famously successful people.

There would be few adults in the western world who have not heard of Steve Jobs. A pioneer of personal computing, an entrepreneur of unrivalled clout, one-time owner of the world’s most successful digital animation studio, the man who took the helm of an almost bankrupt computer company and transformed it into the most valuable business in the world.

But have you ever heard about Steve Jobs’ skateboarding skills? Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2013: Jeff Paton on ‘Safety Not Guaranteed: How Successful (Agile) Teams Ignore the Rules to Create Successful Products’

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I attended Day 1 of YOW! Sydney 2013 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

Two people dressed as crash test dummies with their thumbs up. Does following Agile processes to the letter mean your team will be safe and succeed?Jeff Paton (@jeffpaton) is an independent consultant, teacher and Agile coach, and (I believe someone said) the inventor of Story Mapping. He spoke at YOW! about ‘Safety Not Guaranteed: How Successful Teams Ignore the Rules to Create Successful Products’.

Jeff started his talk by announcing that he hated agile development since the moment he first heard of it, but went on to explain that he doesn’t really hate agile now and that an important part of this has been to learn to pay a lot of attention to what he’s doing. Continue reading →

Notes from YOW! 2013: Jeff Hawkins on ‘Computing Like the Brain: The Path to Machine Intelligence’

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I attended Day 1 of YOW! Sydney 2013 and thought some people might get something useful out of my notes. These aren’t my complete reinterpretations of every slide, but just things I jotted down that I thought were interesting enough to remember or look into further.

A visual repesentation of machine intelligence as an incandescent brain with digital inputs and outputsKeynote, Day 1: Jeff Hawkins spoke about “Computing Like the Brain: The Path to Machine Intelligence”

Jeff is an entrepreneur (he invented this slightly popular thing called the Palm Pilot) and scientist who co-founded Grok (formerly Numenta) to build technology based on theories of how the neocortex of mammalian brains works. Continue reading →

Does Scala == Effective Java?

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From the archive: Originally written in January 2011, this post from my old blog, Graham Hacking Scala, has been consistently popular ever since and I thought it deserved a new lease on life here…

'Effective Java (2nd Edition)' by Joshua Bloch. Many of its suggestions are redundant if coding in Scala.I started reading Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java last week. I’ll have to admit that I haven’t read it before, but only because I’ve been told by several people, “you already do most of what’s in there anyway.” Seeing as we tell all the new recruits to read it, I thought I should actually flip through it myself so I know what’s in there.

Books of best practices are always written in relation to domains that have many possibilities for bad practices (choosing otherwise would make for a very short book). Reading the first chapter of Effective Java, I was amused as I realised that, if you’re coding in Scala instead of Java, many of the book’s recommendations are either unnecessary, because Scala doesn’t permit the corollary bad practice, or built into the language of Scala, or made easier to implement than they are in Java. This isn’t a criticism of the book, but an observation that the state of the art is moving on, and Java is being left behind.

From the first 25 items in the book, here are my notes on practices that either become easier to follow or unnecessary if you are using Scala: Continue reading →

Are Git and Mercurial Anti-Agile?

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Drainage pipes running down the wall of a factory, branching and merging as they descend, similar to the disorganisation that branches can cause in Git and Mercurial.This is a question I’ve been asking myself for a while. It’s not a fully-thought out argument (that’s why it’s still a question), but it’s a train of thought that I think warrants some investigation. I’d love to get some opinions from people with good or bad experiences of using DVCS with Agile as to how this plays out practically.

So, here’s my train of thought…

Easy branching and merging is the killer feature of Git and Mercurial.

They improve on other centralised systems (Subversion, CVS) in many other ways, but branching and merging is the reason that’s always used to sell the switch. The question I want to raise is whether branching and merging are good tools for an agile development team, or a nuisance. Continue reading →

Who is Investing in Australian Startups?

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A graph containing circles of different sizes with arrows pointing all around the place, invoking the idea of entrepreneurs investing in startupsRight now, there’s a fantastic “Startup Spring” festival going on across Australia, organised by StartupAUS, with hundreds of great events across 3 weeks. I noticed that veteran US investor Bill Tai did a tour of several major cities last week. Wondering whether he had any Australian connection, I looked up Bill’s credentials and found that he is in fact an investor in high-profile Aussie startups Shoes of Prey and Canva.

That got me wondering: Who else is investing in Australian startups? This would be useful information for some people to know, especially if they’re planning on raising venture capital funding but would prefer to keep the company local. If only there was a database of startup investments that could be queried programmatically…

Why, hello there, Crunchbase API! 🙂

So, without further ado, here is the…

List of Startup Investors (as recorded on Crunchbase) in Companies That Only Have Offices in Australia: Continue reading →

“Why the Bloody Hell Did You Come Here?” (says Australia, to Asylum Seekers)

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These people have escaped persecution to find themselves in a country that officially does not want them.

Asylum seekers arrive at Christmas Island on a small flat boat, wearing life jackets, kneeling in a line and being escorted by what appear to be immigration staff.A retired friend of mine has recently become involved in efforts to help newly-released asylum seekers in Sydney. He wrote the email below to myself and a few others. It is a damning assessment, from people on the ground, of how the Australian government is treating people in need. I’m publishing it here because I think it is important for people to know what this government (as well as the main party trying to replace them) is doing in our name. Continue reading →

Murphy’s Law Should Appear In Every Line Of Your Code

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A graphic from a 1930s German pamphlet showing a woman being electrocuted because she touched an overhead lamp and a gas pipe at the same time. Murphy's Law aims to stop these kinds of catastrophes.You know Murphy’s Law, right? Or at least you know the way most people remember it: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” It’s a fairly depressing way of summarising life, but we all recognise a large portion of truth within it. Things go wrong. All the time.

There’s actually contention over whether this is the original form of the law, which is named after aerospace engineer Capt. Edward A. Murphy, and there are several differing accounts of how the saying came about. My preferred account is that relayed by Australia’s Dr Karl Kruszelnicki, whose record of Captain Murphy’s original exclamation is:

If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.

I like this version because it’s easier to see the qualified optimism that Murphy juxtaposed with his frustration. As Dr Karl explains, there is a hope embedded in this form of the law because it starts with a proposition: “IF there are two or more ways to do something…” Continue reading →

10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Have Senior Developers, Tech Leads or Architects

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Two weeks ago I published a post titled ‘Why Smart Software Teams Don’t Need Senior Developers, Tech Leads or Architects‘. I received a lot of good feedback, but I also know it was a long read. So, if you’re interested by the title but are looking for a quick brain dump rather than an enjoyable read, here’s the abridged version:

At Tyro Payments, we’ve doubled our Engineering team over the last year.

We don’t hire for, or use, titles like Graduate Developer, Junior Developer, Senior Developer, Tech Lead or Architect. Everyone has the title ‘Software Engineer’.

This is an important part of Tyro’s Engineering team culture. Here are the reasons… Continue reading →