![Learn to Estimate
Giovanni Asproni
An estimate is an approximate calculation or judgement of the
value, number, quantity, or extent of something. This definition
implies that [...] hopes and wishes must be ignored when
calculating it. The definition also implies that, being
approximate, an estimate cannot be precise, e.g., a
development task cannot be estimated to last 234.14 days.
A target is a statement of a desirable business objective, e.g.,
“The system must support at least 400 concurrent users.”
A commitment is a promise to deliver specified functionality at
a certain level of quality by a certain date or event.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/selective97thingseveryprogrammershouldknow-140302050101-phpapp02/85/Selective-97-things-every-programmer-should-know-8-320.jpg)
![Encapsulate Behavior,
Not Just State
Einar Landre
An object encapsulates both state and behavior, where
the behavior is defined by the actual state. [...]
This inherent property of an object makes the design
process conceptually simple. It boils down to two
simple tasks: allocation and delegation of
responsibility to the different objects including the
interobject interaction protocols.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/selective97thingseveryprogrammershouldknow-140302050101-phpapp02/85/Selective-97-things-every-programmer-should-know-12-320.jpg)
![Apply Functional
Programming Principles
Edward Garson
An expression is said to be referentially transparent if it can be
replaced with its value without changing the program (in other words,
yielding a program that has the same effects and output on the same
input). [...]
The importance of referential transparency is that it allows a
programmer (or compiler) to reason about program behavior. This can
help in proving correctness, simplifying an algorithm, assisting in
modifying code without breaking it, or optimizing code by means of
memoization, common subexpression elimination or parallelization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referential_transparency_(computer_science)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/selective97thingseveryprogrammershouldknow-140302050101-phpapp02/85/Selective-97-things-every-programmer-should-know-18-320.jpg)
Selective 97 things every programmer should know
- 1. 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com @97TEPSK Kevlin Henney kevlin@curbralan.com @KevlinHenney
- 3. Adrian Wible Alan Griffiths Alex Miller Allan Kelly Anders Norås Ann Katrin Gagnat Aslam Khan Burk Hufnagel Cal Evans Carroll Robinson Cay Horstmann Chuck Allison Clint Shank Dan Bergh Johnsson Dan North Daniel Lindner Diomidis Spinellis Edward Garson Einar Landre Filip van Laenen Gerard Meszaros Giles Colborne Giovanni Asproni Greg Colvin Gregor Hohpe Gudny Hauknes Heinz Kabutz Jan Christiaan "JC" van Winkel Janet Gregory Jason P Sage Johannes Brodwall Jon Jagger Jørn Ølmheim Kari Røssland Karianne Berg Keith Braithwaite Kevlin Henney Kirk Pepperdine Klaus Marquardt Linda Rising Marcus Baker Matt Doar Mattias Karlsson Michael Feathers Michael Hunger Mike Lewis Nate Jackson Neal Ford Niclas Nilsson Olve Maudal Paul W Homer Pete Goodliffe Peter Sommerlad Rajith Attapattu Randy Stafford Richard Monson-Haefel Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob) Rod Begbie Russel Winder Ryan Brush Sam Saariste Sarah Mount Scott Meyers Seb Rose Steve Berczuk Steve Freeman Steve Smith Thomas Guest Udi Dahan Verity Stob Walter Bright Yechiel Kimchi Yuriy Zubarev
- 5. Act with Prudence Apply Functional Programming Principles Ask "What Would the User Do?" (You Are Not the User) Automate Your Coding Standard Beauty Is in Simplicity Before You Refactor Beware the Share The Boy Scout Rule Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others Choose Your Tools with Care Code in the Language of the Domain Code Is Design Code Layout Matters Code Reviews Coding with Reason A Comment on Comments Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say Continuous Learning Convenience Is Not an –ility Deploy Early and Often Distinguish Business Exceptions from Technical Do Lots of Deliberate Practice Domain-Specific Languages Don't Be Afraid to Break Things Don't Be Cute with Your Test Data Don't Ignore That Error! Don't Just Learn the Language, Understand its Culture Don't Nail Your Program into the Upright Position Don't Rely on "Magic Happens Here" Don't Repeat Yourself Don't Touch That Code! Encapsulate Behavior, Not Just State Floating-Point Numbers Aren't Real Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source The Golden Rule of API Design The Guru Myth Hard Work Does Not Pay Off How to Use a Bug Tracker Improve Code by Removing It Install Me Inter-Process Communication Affects Application Response Time Keep the Build Clean Know How to Use Command-line Tools Know Well More than Two Programming Languages Know Your IDE Know Your Limits Know Your Next Commit Large Interconnected Data Belongs to a Database Learn Foreign Languages Learn to Estimate Learn to Say "Hello, World" Let Your Project Speak for Itself The Linker Is Not a Magical Program The Longevity of Interim Solutions Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly Make the Invisible More Visible Message Passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems A Message to the Future Missing Opportunities for Polymorphism News of the Weird: Testers Are Your Friends One Binary Only the Code Tells the Truth Own (and Refactor) the Build Pair Program and Feel the Flow Prefer Domain-Specific Types to Primitive Types Prevent Errors The Professional Programmer Put Everything Under Version Control Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard Read Code Read the Humanities Reinvent the Wheel Often Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs Simplicity Comes from Reduction The Single Responsibility Principle Start from Yes Step Back and Automate, Automate, Automate Take Advantage of Code Analysis Tools Test for Required Behavior, Not Incidental Behavior Test Precisely and Concretely Test While You Sleep (and over Weekends) Testing Is the Engineering Rigor of Software Development Thinking in States Two Heads Are Often Better than One Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix) Ubuntu Coding for Your Friends The Unix Tools Are Your Friends Use the Right Algorithm and Data Structure Verbose Logging Will Disturb Your Sleep WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks When Programmers and Testers Collaborate Write Code as If You Had to Support It for the Rest of Your Life Write Small Functions Using Examples Write Tests for People You Gotta Care About the Code Your Customers Do Not Mean What They Say
- 6. Act with Prudence Apply Functional Programming Principles Ask "What Would the User Do?" (You Are Not the User) Automate Your Coding Standard Beauty Is in Simplicity Before You Refactor Beware the Share The Boy Scout Rule Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others Choose Your Tools with Care Code in the Language of the Domain Code Is Design Code Layout Matters Code Reviews Coding with Reason A Comment on Comments Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say Continuous Learning Convenience Is Not an –ility Deploy Early and Often Distinguish Business Exceptions from Technical Do Lots of Deliberate Practice Domain-Specific Languages Don't Be Afraid to Break Things Don't Be Cute with Your Test Data Don't Ignore That Error! Don't Just Learn the Language, Understand its Culture Don't Nail Your Program into the Upright Position Don't Rely on "Magic Happens Here" Don't Repeat Yourself Don't Touch That Code! Encapsulate Behavior, Not Just State Floating-Point Numbers Aren't Real Fulfill Your Ambitions with Open Source The Golden Rule of API Design The Guru Myth Hard Work Does Not Pay Off How to Use a Bug Tracker Improve Code by Removing It Install Me Inter-Process Communication Affects Application Response Time Keep the Build Clean Know How to Use Command-line Tools Know Well More than Two Programming Languages Know Your IDE Know Your Limits Know Your Next Commit Large Interconnected Data Belongs to a Database Learn Foreign Languages Learn to Estimate Learn to Say "Hello, World" Let Your Project Speak for Itself The Linker Is Not a Magical Program The Longevity of Interim Solutions Make Interfaces Easy to Use Correctly and Hard to Use Incorrectly Make the Invisible More Visible Message Passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems A Message to the Future Missing Opportunities for Polymorphism News of the Weird: Testers Are Your Friends One Binary Only the Code Tells the Truth Own (and Refactor) the Build Pair Program and Feel the Flow Prefer Domain-Specific Types to Primitive Types Prevent Errors The Professional Programmer Put Everything Under Version Control Put the Mouse Down and Step Away from the Keyboard Read Code Read the Humanities Reinvent the Wheel Often Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs Simplicity Comes from Reduction The Single Responsibility Principle Start from Yes Step Back and Automate, Automate, Automate Take Advantage of Code Analysis Tools Test for Required Behavior, Not Incidental Behavior Test Precisely and Concretely Test While You Sleep (and over Weekends) Testing Is the Engineering Rigor of Software Development Thinking in States Two Heads Are Often Better than One Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix) Ubuntu Coding for Your Friends The Unix Tools Are Your Friends Use the Right Algorithm and Data Structure Verbose Logging Will Disturb Your Sleep WET Dilutes Performance Bottlenecks When Programmers and Testers Collaborate Write Code as If You Had to Support It for the Rest of Your Life Write Small Functions Using Examples Write Tests for People You Gotta Care About the Code Your Customers Do Not Mean What They Say
- 7. Do Lots of Deliberate Practice Jon Jagger You do deliberate practice to improve your ability to perform a task. It’s about skill and technique. Deliberate practice means repetition. It means performing the task with the aim of increasing your mastery of one or more aspects of the task. It means repeating the repetition. Slowly, over and over again, until you achieve your desired level of mastery. You do deliberate practice to master the task, not to complete the task.
- 8. Learn to Estimate Giovanni Asproni An estimate is an approximate calculation or judgement of the value, number, quantity, or extent of something. This definition implies that [...] hopes and wishes must be ignored when calculating it. The definition also implies that, being approximate, an estimate cannot be precise, e.g., a development task cannot be estimated to last 234.14 days. A target is a statement of a desirable business objective, e.g., “The system must support at least 400 concurrent users.” A commitment is a promise to deliver specified functionality at a certain level of quality by a certain date or event.
- 9. Know Your Next Commit Dan Bergh Johnsson I tapped three programmers on their shoulders and asked what they were doing. “I am refactoring these methods,” the first answered. “I am adding some parameters to this web action,” the second answered. The third answered, “I am working on this user story.” It might seem that the first two were engrossed in the details of their work, while only the third could see the bigger picture, and that he had the better focus. However, when I asked when and what they would commit, the picture changed dramatically. The first two were pretty clear about what files would be involved, and would be finished within an hour or so. The third programmer answered, “Oh, I guess I will be ready within a few days. I will probably add a few classes and might change those services in some way.”
- 10. Comment Only What the Code Cannot Say Kevlin Henney 1. If a program is incorrect, it matters little what the documentation says. 2. If documentation does not agree with the code, it is not worth much. 3. Consequently, code must largely document itself. If it cannot, rewrite the code rather than increase the supplementary documentation. Good code needs fewer comments than bad code does. 4. Comments should provide additional information that is not readily obtainable from the code itself. They should never parrot the code. 5. Mnemonic variable names and labels, and a layout that emphasizes logical structure, help make a program self‐documenting. Kernighan and Plauger The Elements of Programming Style
- 11. Code in the Language of the Domain Dan North Phillip Calçado http://fragmental.tw/2009/04/29/tag-clouds-see-how-noisy-your-code-is/
- 12. Encapsulate Behavior, Not Just State Einar Landre An object encapsulates both state and behavior, where the behavior is defined by the actual state. [...] This inherent property of an object makes the design process conceptually simple. It boils down to two simple tasks: allocation and delegation of responsibility to the different objects including the interobject interaction protocols.
- 13. Don't Repeat Yourself Steve Smith Duplication Is Waste Repetition in Process Calls for Automation Repetition in Logic Calls for Abstraction
- 14. Beware the Share Udi Dahan The fact that two wildly different parts of the system performed some logic in the same way meant less than I thought. Up until I had pulled out those libraries of shared code, these parts were not dependent on each other. Each could evolve independently. Each could change its logic to suit the needs of the system’s changing business environment. Those four lines of similar code were accidental—a temporal anomaly, a coincidence. That is, until I came along.
- 15. The Road to Performance Is Littered with Dirty Code Bombs Kirk Pepperdine MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, PERFORMANCE TUNING A SYSTEM REQUIRES YOU TO ALTER CODE. WHEN WE NEED TO ALTER CODE, EVERY CHUNK THAT IS OVERLY COMPLEX OR HIGHLY COUPLED IS A DIRTY CODE BOMB LYING IN WAIT TO DERAIL THE EFFORT. THE FIRST CASUALTY OF DIRTY CODE WILL BE YOUR SCHEDULE.
- 16. Act with Prudence Seb Rose Martin Fowler http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TechnicalDebtQuadrant.html
- 17. The Boy Scout Rule Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob) Try and leave this world a little better than you found it. Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell
- 18. Apply Functional Programming Principles Edward Garson An expression is said to be referentially transparent if it can be replaced with its value without changing the program (in other words, yielding a program that has the same effects and output on the same input). [...] The importance of referential transparency is that it allows a programmer (or compiler) to reason about program behavior. This can help in proving correctness, simplifying an algorithm, assisting in modifying code without breaking it, or optimizing code by means of memoization, common subexpression elimination or parallelization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referential_transparency_(computer_science)
- 19. Thinking in States Niclas Nilsson People in the real world have a weird relationship with state. In most real-world situations, people’s relaxed attitude toward state is not an issue. Unfortunately, however, many programmers are quite vague about state too — and that is a problem.
- 20. Two Wrongs Can Make a Right (and Are Difficult to Fix) Allan Kelly
- 21. Code Reviews Mattias Karlsson Making code reviews fun is perhaps the most important contributor to success. Reviews are about the people reviewing. If the review meeting is painful or dull, it will be hard to motivate anyone. Make it an informal code review whose principal purpose is to share knowledge among team members. Leave sarcastic comments outside, and bring a cake or brown-bag lunch instead.
- 22. Testing Is the Engineering Rigor of Software Development Neal Ford Testing “hard” things is tough because you have to build them to test them, which discourages speculative building just to see what will happen. But the building process in software is ridiculously cheap.
- 23. Write Tests for People Gerard Meszaros So who should you be writing the tests for? For the person trying to understand your code. Good tests act as documentation for the code they are testing. They describe how the code works. For each usage scenario, the test(s): o Describe the context, starting point, or preconditions that must be satisfied o Illustrate how the software is invoked o Describe the expected results or postconditions to be verified Different usage scenarios will have slightly different versions of each of these.
- 24. Don't Be Cute with Your Test Data Rod Begbie
- 25. Ask "What Would the User Do?" (You Are Not the User) Giles Colborne We all tend to assume that other people think like us. But they don't. Psychologists call this the false consensus bias. This bias explains why programmers have such a hard time putting themselves in the users' position. Users don't think like programmers. The best way to find out how a user thinks is to watch one.
- 26. Ubuntu Coding for Your Friends Aslam Khan Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu
- 27. The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it. Edward R Murrow