Archive for April, 2014
An Unfoolish Consistency: Introducing PEP8 to a legacy codebase
Consistency with this style guide is important. Consistency within a project is more important. Consistency within one module or function is most important. The EVE source code, being initially developed before PEP8 existed, was based on Microsoft’s C++ style. Mostly this is manifested in UpperCamelCase function and method names,...
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goless- Golang semantics in Python
The goless library https://github.com/rgalanakis/goless provides Go programming language semantics built on top of Stackless Python or gevent.* Here is a Go example using channels and Select converted to goless: c1 = goless.chan() c2 = goless.chan() def func1(): time.sleep(1) c1.send('one') goless.go(func1) def func2(): time.sleep(2) c2.send('two') goless.go(func2) for i in range(2):...
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Results are not the point?
The phrase “results are not the point” often confuses people new to Lean thinking. It confused the shit out of me, not having really understood it even after my first few books. This is a shame, because it’s such a simple thing. On Friday night, Danny got really drunk,...
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The “Year of Code” Director is Your Boss
There was some hubbub a few months ago when it was revealed the Executive Director of the UK’s Year of Code initiative can’t code [link]. Not that technical (domain) competency is a sufficient condition for management and leadership, but I’d certainly call it a necessary condition. (I’ll use the...
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The manager’s responsibility to review code
I believe any technical leader has a responsibility to review all the code that goes into a codebase.* I am certainly not the only person to feel this way (Joe Duffy as MSFT and Aras Pranckevičius as Unity have said the same). Furthermore, I don’t believe the responsibility to...
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Why Agile became meaningless
Uncle Bob recently wrote a post about The True Corruption of Agile. I think it will be a defining post for me because, as I’ll explain in my next post, I’m ready to give up on Agile. It has become meaningless due to the corruption Uncle Bob describes, and...
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Global Glob
I am cleaning out my drafts and found this two year old post titled “Globals Glob” with no content. The story is worth telling so here we go. There was a class the EVE client used to control how missiles behaved. We needed to start using it in our...
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What does your Product Owner own?
In a previous post, I came down hard on Agile leaders that don’t program. Now I’ll turn my sights to another part of the Scrum trinity: the Product Owner. I’ll raise some concerns for what I’ve seen it become in videogames, and suggestions for improving how we use the...
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Mike Bland’s profound analysis of the Apple SSL bug
Mike Bland has done a series of articles and presentations about the Apple SSL bug over on his blog. To be frank, it’s pretty much the only good coverage of the bug I’ve seen. He’s submitted an article to the ACM; crossing my fingers it gets printed, because it’s...
