Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Four Bits Worth of Dev Advice

Inspired mainly by 2 talks I saw at the JAOO 2008 conference (Kevlin Henney: Programmers Dozen, and Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann: 5 Design Considerations) I've put together list of advice for programmers. Such a list could obviously go on and on and on, but the exercise here is to choose the advice that I find most important, and that I see violated time and time again. So I decided to only allow as many pieces of advice as can be enumerated in 4 bits. And here's the raw, unexplained list:

0000: No bool to bool conversion
0001: Trust the implementation
0010: Declarative over imperative
0011: Beware of vampires
0100: Consider infrastructure orientation
0101: Use role based interfaces
0110: Be economic
0111: Prefer code over comments
1000: Use symmetric interfaces
1001: Use one abstraction level per method
1010: Grow guts
1011: Prefer use over reuse
1100: Write change friendly code
1101: Dry
1110: Don’t stay stuck
1111: Be curious

Most, but not all of these appeared in the two talks mentioned above.
I will be posting about all of the pieces of advice in the near future ([2], [3], [4]).

No comments:

Post a Comment