Developer productivity: what's all the fuss about?

The controversy about developer productivity

There’s been a lot of controversy recently about developer productivity. Some very big consultancies claimed you could and should measure it, while some software product development legends are of a different opinion. The legends are making fun of the consultancies, which are in turn accusing the legends of wanting to dodge accountability for their work.

Array sorters aren't problem solvers

The evergreen problem-solving

If you work in software product development like me, you hear a lot about problem-solving. Problem-solving skills, problem-solving attitude, problem-solving interview steps.

What most companies call problem-solving has nothing to do with actual problems, though. And the interview steps aimed at testing a candidate’s skills at this? They’re completely off the mark. As a candidate, you typically get 30 to 45 minutes to complete a coding task, which usually involves sorting arrays, inverting binary trees, or achieving something trivial under some made-up limitations, like implementing the multiplication operation.

Confessions of a TDD fanboy

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is arguably one of the most polarizing and misunderstood approaches in software development. It’s love it or hate it.

Let’s have a look at TDD and why it provokes such strong reactions. This is going to piss some people off…

To modularize or not to modularize, that is the question!

Why are we talking about modules?

Because we want to scale, and if we don’t modularize we won’t be able to scale.

Mmm, but wait a minute, there are giant companies that don’t use modules, so we can scale without them!