I talk a lot about how having a spec is a critical component of software development. But how do you know that your spec is good, and that it has been developed enough? Simply put, how do you distinguish between a good spec and a spec that is lacking?

Were I writing this as an article for a newspaper, the subhead would be “Design Patterns Don’t Cause Application Slowness.” The point of this piece isn’t to defend Active Record per se; it’s to discuss the fact that design patterns aren’t to blame for your application’s problems, and more to the point, design patterns aren’t [...]

On Tuesday, Marco Tabini told us that we were doing it all wrong. He makes some fantastic points about software development overall, and about the state of our profession. This article’s point isn’t to be a rebuttal, but a corollary to what he had to say.

Shipping code that works is crucial to retaining the support of customers and high quality in your application. While it’s impossible to ship code without any bugs at all, it is possible to control for as many as possible, and fix as many known issues as there is time. These strategies are designed to ensure [...]

Often when I’m on a job interview, I’ll ask whether or not the company I’m talking with makes use of an automated build system of any kind. More often than not, the answer I get is somewhere along the lines of “build systems are irrelevant to the web; we can simply upload changes instantly.”