Working with Coders (eBook)

Patrick Gleeson has been a coder and a manager of coders for the past 10 years. He has worked in a variety of organizations, from bespoke software consultancies to multinational corporations to tiny start-ups, and is currently CTO of Think Smart, a company that provides tools to help young people make better career choices. He holds a degree from the University of Cambridge in Philosophy and Classics, and another one from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in Technical Theatre. He also sidelines as a composer for film and theater, and once spent a year building animatronic puppets as part of a robot circus, including a mechanical octopus that played the xylophone.

Contents 6
About the Author 7
Acknowledgments 8
Introduction 9
Chapter 1: Introductions 11
Who you are 12
The Project Manager 12
The CEO 13
The Client 13
Sound familiar? 14
Who I am 14
What this book is 15
What this book is not 17
This is not a book about young white male nerds 17
This is not a book about how to code 19
This is not an attack on non-technical people 20
Chapter 2: Why Writing Software Is Nothing Like Building a House 21
The sad truth about software projects 22
Crunchy numbers 25
The Imagination Problem 27
Birthday wishes 28
Technical specifications, human processes 30
Starting from the wrong place 33
A counterproductive mitigation 34
The Estimation Problem 36
A known issue 37
The uninteresting 40
The unknown 43
Refusing to play the game 46
Estimates are graphs, not points 48
Empiricism 49
The Arithmetic Problem 51
The case of Pheidippides and the singing gorillagram 52
Brooks’s Law 54
In summary 54
Chapter 3: (Fr)Agile 55
A brief introduction to Agile 55
SCRUM 57
Other methodologies 60
The advantages of Agile 61
Small sprints and big decisions 63
Keeping it minimal 65
Stakeholder buy-in 67
“I don’t need to check in every week—just send me a report” 67
“But I already know what I want” 68
“But this new thing needs to get done right now” 69
“But I need those estimates now” 70
Buy-in is fine, but embraces are better 71
Embedded designers and the two-way conversation 72
Syncing 72
Two steps forward, three steps back 73
Integration 74
Agile vs Lean 76
Cleaning up 76
Agile AND Lean 78
When not to use Agile 79
Long cycle times 79
The communicable and the knowable 80
Two types of trust 81
In summary 82
Chapter 4: What Do They Do All Day? 83
What to build 84
Spec it before you build it 84
Yes, you do need to spec it 85
UX details matter 86
A functional specification 88
3.2.7: Key Stats Summary Screen 91
Telling tales 92
A User Story is not a specification 94
It’s a given 95
3.2.7: Key Stats Summary Screen 95
Handing over 97
Code 98
Ones and zeroes 99
Computer guts 102
Software development is an abstract art 104
Objectified 109
Coding is modeling (but not the glamorous type) 113
Done 114
Source control 115
A second pair of eyes 116
Deployment 119
In summary 121
Chapter 5: The Big Green Check Mark 122
The hard way 123
Does it do what it says it does? 124
Does it do what it doesn’t say it does? 124
Does it do what it said it did? 126
Coping with failure 126
Just accept it 129
Where there’s smoke 130
The other hard way 131
Internal examinations 133
Test drives 138
Invisible quality 140
Indebted 141
Prevention 142
Cure 144
In summary 147
Chapter 6: Taking the “Arg” out of Jargon 148
Internet 149
Data 155
Security 159
Coding 163
In summary 168
Chapter 7: So You Need to Hire a Coder 169
Do you actually need a coder? 170
Build vs. buy 170
Hired guns 172
Foreign shores 174
How to look for a coder 175
How to interview a coder 178
Technically challenging 179
Being human 181
How to get a coder to say yes 183
In summary 184
Chapter 8: Programmer Preoccupations 185
The forum phenomenon 186
The Hype Cycle 189
The thrill of the new 189
Tech death 191
Teething problems 192
Coder wars 193
Beauty in code 195
In summary 198
Chapter 9: Keeping Coders Happy 199
A quiet room and a powerful computer 200
Keeping shtum 201
Unleashed 202
Odd hours 202
Flexibility 202
Feeling the burn 203
Old and new 205
Being supportive 205
Legacies 207
Open sourcing 209
Continuing to learn 211
In summary 212
Chapter 10: When It All Goes Wrong 213
When your team hate each other 214
When you’re horribly behind schedule 217
When your product just isn’t very good 219
Wrapping up 223
Index 224