Tag Archives: software

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 →

Why Smart Software Teams Don’t Need Senior Developers, Tech Leads or Architects

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Queue for Steve Jobs' keynote at WWDC 2010

A queue of software developers, not unlike the one that has inundated my inbox for the last year.

We’ve almost doubled our Engineering team at Tyro Payments over the last financial year and we’ll be adding that many again this year.

Most people who’ve worked in or with software teams would imagine that within this surge of hiring we’ve been filling all kinds of different roles – Graduate Developers, Junior Developers, Seniors, a couple of Tech Leads, maybe an Architect. But the truth is we’ve only been hiring for one role: Software Engineer. In fact, it’s the only development role on our team, and it’s the title we give to everyone on the tools, whether they have 20 years’ experience or none. This isn’t just some convenience we came up with to save ourselves HR work. It’s an incredibly important part of the culture at Tyro. Why? Continue reading →

A New Java Library for Amazing Productivity

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I’ve found this great Java library that can make developers more efficient in pretty much every source file they write. It has the following features:

  • Ferrari 458 Italiaa broad and powerful collections framework
  • collection methods that greatly reduce boilerplate
  • immutable collections that don’t have mutation methods (unlike java.util classes where e.g. List.add() throws an exception if the list is immutable)
  • an awesome switch-like function that doesn’t just match numbers, enums, chars and strings, but can succinctly match all kinds of patterns in lots of different classes, even in your own classes
  • an annotation that automatically writes meaningful equals, hashCode and toString methods for classes whose fields don’t change (without using reflection) Continue reading →

Is it really a DSL, or just an expressive interface?

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Clowsn with GuitarsI think the term ‘Domain Specific Language’ (DSL) is starting to become over-used and is being applied to things that aren’t really languages at all.

A Tale of Two Designers

When I think about explaining DSLs to people, the examples that spring to mind are languages like SQL, Regular Expressions, maybe even BNF, or CORBA IDL. And if I think about Why these languages exist, I imagine that somewhere, at some time, somebody thought:

I’m going to design a new language that is specifically crafted for solving this particular problem.

I like DSLs. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say I love them. They are powerful, expressive, and allow people who are eager to describe a solution or encode information (be they programmers or otherwise) to escape the complexities of imperative paradigms and Von Neumann thinking, permitting a strong focus on the actual problem.

In contrast to the above, the way in which I’ve most frequently seen the term DSL used of late is from people thinking something more like this: Continue reading →

Graham’s Guide to Learning Scala

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From The Archives: This article is one of the all-time most popular posts from my previous blog Graham Hacking Scala. I thought it worth updating and re-printing it here.

It’s a pretty widely-accepted view that, as a programmer, learning new languages is a Good Idea™ . Most people with more than one language under their belt would say that learning new languages broadens your mind in ways that will positively affect the way you work, even if you never use that language again.

With the Christmas holidays coming up and many people likely to take some time off work, this end of the year presents a great opportunity to take some time out from your week-to-week programming grind and do some learning.

With that in mind, I present “Graham’s Guide to Learning Scala”. There are many, many resources on the web for learning about Scala. In fact, I think there’s probably too many! It would be quite easy to start in the wrong place and quickly get discouraged.

So this is not yet another resource to add to the pile. Rather, this is a guided course through what I believe are some of the best resources for learning Scala, and in an order that I think will help a complete newbie pick it up quickly but without feeling overwhelmed.

And, best of all, it has 9 Steps!

Continue reading →

ScalaSyd Wrap-Up: November 2012

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ScalaSyd: Episode 9

We had a great meeting at ScalaSyd last Wednesday night, probably one of the best I’ve been to. These are my notes from the evening, which are in no way comprehensive – they are just the points I found most interesting.

Jed (@jedws) warned us at the start that there were two “pointy” talks with some soft stuff in the middle, but I found the two pointy talkers did an excellent job of conveying their pointy subjects to neophytes. Not an easy task, so well done, guys.

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Meetup Digest: Migrate to DVCS Sydney (October 2012)

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Two weeks ago, I and a couple of other developers from Tyro went to the first “Migrate to DVCS Sydney” Meetup at Atlassian’s new headquarters. Here’s my notes on the most salient points from the evening (with some editorial by me in italics) …

Talk 1 – Jonathon Creenaune from the JIRA team

  • Know why you’re migrating. I’m sure he meant, and may have even said: have a business reason to change, don’t just be a cargo cult.

Continue reading →