Today I'm going to explore a question that's been rattling around in my head, "Why does software inevitably get worse over time?". Every software systems I've worked on inevitably decays and becomes difficult to work with, despite everyone's best intentions. Why is this? Well, I've come to believe that this is a systemic effect, resulting from the businesses hyper-focus on immediate profit, causing a mis-balance between exploitation and exploration. ## Exploitation vs Exploration: The [exploitation vs exploration dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration-exploitation_dilemma) is a key factor in any decision that factors in...
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A question that often comes up in conversation with other developers is "How do I deal with requests for estimates?". Usually the person asking the question is frustrated, they know that any estimates they create are pure fiction, yet management keeps asking for them anyway. Then they ask the real question; "How do you make them stop?". Well, I usually give the same answer, "You don't.". Instead you need to ask why are they asking for estimates in the first place. What problem are estimates solving for them? Once you understand that you can figure out the best way to help. ## Why we're asked for estimates When I listen to develop...
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Software development is hard, and there have been many attempts to simplify the process over the years, some good, most bad. I'd like to discuss one of the bad attempts, a recurring problem I've seen in software development that myself and my friends have dubbed "Template Driven Development" (the bad TDD). Template Driven Development is the practice of reducing software development down to a series of templates that developers should follow. Developers are given a user story and a rigid schema for how their system should be structured, they are to use a set of pre-defined patterns that they must follow when modelling concepts in th...
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The following are my notes from the last DDD IE meetup, [6th June 2019](https://www.meetup.com/Domain-Driven-Design-Ireland/events/261668803/), on how to introduce DDD to your company. This post is about the concepts we discussed and discussions we had around the topic. There's some great stuff in here, the kind that can only happens through discussion and collaboration. First off, the meetup itself was structured as half talk, have group discussion, with discussion interspersed throughout the slides. We've done a few of these style of meetups in the past and they've worked out really well. Here are the slides: https://slides.com...
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This idea for this article came from a twitter thread by [@ErynnBrook](https://twitter.com/ErynnBrook/).

I’ve got some time today, thinking about doing a thread on mansplaining.

Dude followers, if the word mansplaining makes you a little uneasy, let me know and I’ll unpack it here :)

— Erynn Brook (@ErynnBrook) May 30, 2018

The t...
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