Picture Me Coding

In this follow-up to last week's episode on agile processes, Mike and Erik investigate the various criticisms of Agile and even come up with a few new hits of their own! 

Some Things We Referenced:

• Manifesto for Agile Software Development
• See also “Principles behind the Agile Manifesto”
• Agile and the Long Crisis of Software (by Miriam Posner, a professor at UCLA)
• Who Builds a House Without Drawing Blueprints?
• “Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects” (the “study”)
• “Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project”

Send us Fan Mail

If you develop software professionally, chances are you use an agile process as the framework for scheduling and dividing work.  You probably don’t love it, but your level of frustration may lie anywhere on a broad spectrum from benign resignation to brain-damaging rage. 

In this episode, Mike and Erik talk about the history of Agile and what the original Agile manifesto was all about. Then, in part II, they'll cover criticisms of Agile because nobody really loves the stuff and if you've been paying attention lately, most of the chatter in our field seems to be actively bashing it and, in truth, our podcast hosts do not want to be left out of that.

References

• Manifesto for Agile Software Development
• See also “Principles behind the Agile Manifesto”
• Agile and the Long Crisis of Software (by Miriam Posner, a professor at UCLA)
• Who Builds a House Without Drawing Blueprints?
• “Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects” (the “study”)
• “Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project”

Send us Fan Mail

One day Erik decided to foolishly not worry about the 9 fallacies of distributed computing. Surprisingly, Mike seemed to indicate that was fine to do! These guys are pretty irresponsible! Listen along and see for yourself if they're making a terrible mistake.

Links

• Deutsch’s Fallacies 10 years later
• 2021 Software Engineering Radio podcast episode with L. Peter Deutsch
• Google SRE Book Chapter 2 "Embracing Risk"

Send us Fan Mail

This week we take on the subject of compositionality, an ultra-abstract concept that might just underlie all the programming things we do.

Does this idea really inform our work? Do we need category theory to talk about and understand it? Are we required to care?

Here are some references:

• The Composable Codex | Voltron Data
• On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules (1972)
• Composing Software: The Book - by Eric Elliott
• "Category: The Essence of Composition" from Bartosz Milewski's Programming Cafe
• Seven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category Theory
• Erik's `compose` implementation in Python.

Send us Fan Mail

Following publication of a recent report where 80%(!) of software engineers and managers are reporting burnout, Mike and Erik take on the difficult topic of burnout in our industry. Through a discussion of the definition, causes, and frequency of this phenomenon, your Picture Me Coding hosts decide that maybe software itself is to blame!

Resources

• Burnout self-test
• “Burnout in software engineering: A systematic mapping study
• “A newer and broader definition of burnout: Validation of the "Burnout Clinical Subtype Questionnaire (BCSQ-36)”
• World Health Organization Definition
• Scientific American “Science Quickly” podcast episode “You Can’t Fix Burnout with Self-Care”
• Nagoski sisters Ted Talk: “The Cure for Burnout: Hint it isn’t self-care” 
• “Burnout in Software Development - Survey Results 2021”
• Joy Lab podcast “Is It Burnout or Depression?”

Send us Fan Mail

Did you ever wake up one day and realize your microservices architecture had transformed into a large distributed monolith? Did your boss come to your house and did your family try to disown you? Mike and Erik have lived that story too!

In this episode they wade boldly into the microservices vs monoliths discussion and Mike makes the bold claim that doing microservices isn't even an architecture! 

Articles We Talked About

• Martin Fowler's definition
• "How Engineers Can Accidentally Create Distributed Monoliths"
• https://segment.com/blog/goodbye-microservices/
• Monolithic vs. Microservice Architecture: A Performance and Scalability Evaluation | IEEE Journals & Magazine
• Even Amazon can't make sense of serverless or microservices

Send us Fan Mail

Mike made this argument recently that the era of the full stack developer is over.  The so-called stacks are still around, but they're now surrounded by so much infrastructure and supporting technology that claiming to be full-stack is misleading. Mike wrote a whole essay about this, in fact, which you can read over here.

This week, we talked about his idea that fullstack engineering is going away, and we included commentary from an essay called "The Myth of the Fullstack Developer" as well as a mastodon post by Daniel Stenberg that Erik mentioned.

Finally, we closed with a discussion of a related article, "HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points" by Rachel Andrew.

Send us Fan Mail

After a few weeks off while Mike traveled the land, your Picture Me Coding hosts are back this week with an episode about the programming language Rust. They've mentioned this language a few times and, inspired by an offhand comment Mike made about how professional software engineers should "know a compiled language," they dedcided to go deeper into the reasons why it's an attractive language and a good tool in the toolbox for any contemporary software developer.

They also chat briefly about the High on Fire album Cometh the Storm.

Send us Fan Mail

This is part II of our Standing on the Shoulders of Giants episode about Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest philosopher of our field.

Instead of using social media, Dijkstra would dash off hot takes on his typewriter or his pen and in this episode we cover various of his opinions and essays. You'll hear him say stuff like, "Java sucks" and it's "cowardly to call our errors 'bugs'."

Here are some links to the material we discussed:

• On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science (1988)
• Letter protesting U Texas switch to Java from Haskell (2001)
• “How do we tell truths that might hurt?” (1975)
• “On the Foolishness of ‘Natural Language Programming” 
• (Video) “Lecture: Reasoning About Programs - Solving 2 problems using programing” - 1990 

Send us Fan Mail

This week we talked about the greatest philosopher of our field: Edsger Dijkstra. Most software engineers will immediately recall Dijkstra's Algorithm, for finding the shortest path between two nodes in a graph, but Dijkstra's work covers a large range of topics over 5 decades, from code quality to complexity to concurrent programming, and programming languages.

In this episode, we talked specifically about the following works, including the original paper where Dijkstra first published what we now call "Dijkstra's algorithm":

• Notes on structured programming
• Solution of a problem in concurrent program control (1965)
• Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs (1959)
• Go To Statement Considered Harmful

This episode is part I of our Dijkstra discussion. We'll be back next week for more.

Send us Fan Mail