As I’ve practiced refactoring over the years, I continue to find new ways to solve problems better with refactoring. This is why refactoring is such a big deal to me.

Some years ago, our organization used an open source project to run one part of our business. It was good but not a perfect fit. Since it’s open source, we modified it to add the features we needed.

5-year repost! I reference the original post a lot, so I thought it would be a good candidate for reposting here on the new blog. I’m revising the text, but the core message is the same.

I’ve noticed people argue for (or against) #NoEstimates in a bunch of different ways. They’ll often say “what #NoEstimates is really about is…”

When people use the term “DevOps”, what do they mean? Here are the definitions I have seen people use:

You have a problem. You: Ah! I know! I use a distributed system. Now you still have a problem, but you no longer know where.

I hear two main objections/concerns about refactoring: safety and cost.

I feel like this is already well-covered ground. We already know never to rewrite from scratch. The demise of Netscape has been discussed thoroughly. So I’m only going to be able to add a little.

A tale as old as XP…

When Safeguarding we want to reduce the size of a genus of bugs by 15% each time. So what makes a genus of bugs?

At Tableau we use the term “Safeguarding” to describe a particular way of reducing future defects by learning from past defects. Arlo described it in a parable. Here’s my current concrete understanding:

My current understanding of Disciplined Refactoring is that it combines:

(Reposted to improve formatting).

This week we ran a #mobprogramming session with 35 people. Here are some notes about how that went:

I use Ports-and-Adapters to abstract away my application’s interactions with external systems. I bend the dependency’s interface to the shape that I want for my domain. This makes it easier to think about my code and to unit test it.

This uses Jekyll Now to give me a no-administration, code-friendly blog. I love the combination of Markdown + Git.