Software Craftsmanship

Hi, for today’s entry I will talk about a podcast called: “Software Craftsmanship with Bob Martin”. Episode produced in 2009 by Software Engineering Radio. As its name says, this podcast episode is a conversation with “Uncle Bob” (Bob Martin’s nickname) and it is about two main or principal ideas: agile software development and, specifically, software craftsmanship. Basically, they talk about their history, reasons for coming up, main characteristics and their relationship to other agile approaches.

Something I’ve realized lately is that, nowadays, every single new software-related project development is done using agile methodologies or frameworks (as XP and SCRUM, mentioned in my last entry). And that’s one topic they talk about, agile software development, where software is created with a set of incremental and iterative steps (like an iteration in each step, not only one iteration as waterfall development). But I’d never heard about “Software Craftsmanship. This concept is interpreted as some type of approach to software development, but emphasizing coding skills of software developers. It is like an answer from developers to the identified problems or ills of the software industry. A clear example mentioned is how when we finish college and start our professional life, we realize that everything is completely different from what we learned in college and I have no doubt about it (I already experienced that). I agree with Bob in his comment about we learn the things we need for our jobs while working there and should be acquired or guided by other programmers with more skills or experience.

I found this podcast episode really interesting because it talks about the complete truth and things that I’ve already realized but I wasn’t aware of it. I think it’s important to follow Uncle Bob’s recommendations in order to become a skilled programmer and to get better performance in our jobs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Introduction to Metaprogramming

Hi, today's entry is going to talk about an article called “An Introduction to Metaprogramming” written by our professor Ariel Ortiz in 2007. First of all, I just want to mention that I’m really impressed because I didn’t know that our professor had many published articles and papers (we saw the others in my other blog for Compilers Design course). Basically, as its name says, it talks about metaprogramming, which is defined during the article as a program that generates other programs or just program parts. It is used to eliminate or just reduce a “tedious” programming task. It is like instead of writing complex machine code programs, we use any high-level language and use the compiler of that language to do the translation into the programs equivalent in machine code (low-level language). I have to admit that before reading this paper, I hadn’t fully understood the metaprogramming meaning and importance. We used and applied that term in a past course called Programming Languages...
Read more

Understanding the SOLID Principles

Hi, this entry is going to talk about a section called “Understanding the SOLID principles” from the book “Ace the Programming Interview: 160 Questions and Answers for Success” by Wiley in 2013. Basically, the acronym SOLID is explained a round this book section. This acronym stands for five accepted principles about object-oriented programming and design: 1.       S ingle Responsibility Principle: It stays that a class should have just one responsibility. Despite the fact that this principle sounds easy, I found it a little bit complicated, because the explanation wasn’t direct and simplified. Also, the author mentioned that there might be cases in which a class might have two responsibilities. So, at the end, what exactly does this principle stands for? 2.       O pen/Closed Principle: It stays that a class or a function should be open for extension but closed for modification. What does this mean? Our code must have the cap...
Read more

Microservices

Hi, today’s entry is going to talk about an article written by James Lewis and Martin Fowler called “Microservices” in 2014. Basically, by calling microservices, they are referring to like a particular way of designing software applications as suites of independently deployable services. But something interesting is that there is not a precise definition of that type of architectural style, there are only common characteristics around distinct organizations, business capability, automated deployment, intelligence in endpoints and also decentralized control of languages and data. This was the first time I heard this term, and something strange is that despite I didn’t notice about its existence I’d used them sometimes. Later in the articles, the authors gave us some characteristics that any Microservice Architecture must have. They are the following: 1.       Componentization via Services:  This is telling us that by building software, we put together...
Read more