Why neither mandatory nor “opt-out” services deliver on the promise of Platform as a Product — Back in 2018, Even Bottcher wrote a great post about Platform as a Product: https://martinfowler.com/articles/talk-about-platforms.html. Be very careful not to just apply the platform label to the limited virtualised hosting and locked-down centrally-managed tooling that you already have. Bottcher discusses how important it is that platforms be compelling to use…

Thoughts from the belly of the whale… — I want to say yes. I like people and some people are experts. Expertise is often hard won. Therefore it must have some value. Right? Back when I lived in Texas, anti-establishment sentiment underpinned much of the established cultural identity. But, counterculture held up established expertise as a potent virtue. …

Messages flowing into and within the boundaries of a bus — Previously, we reached an awkward half way point. We sent our Cart messages describing events in time. import { Cart } from "./Cart.js"; const cart = Cart(); // 2 yoyos cart(Message(AddedToCart, { …yoyo, quantity: 2 })); // 1 skpping rope cart(Message(AddedToCart, { …skippingRope, quantity: 1 })); // checkout const cartTotals = cart(Message(AtCheckout)); console.log(cartTotals.items, "items, total cost:", cartTotals.total)…

Event-driven patterns in JavaScript shine light into the dustier corners of the language. This article explores customising the behaviour of the instanceof operator. A system I’m working on uses message-passing extensively. Each message has a “type” or “class”, and some associated properties. // 2 yoyos were added to the cart const…

McKinsey’s recent article promoting their productivity management framework has resulted in a mountain of aggrieved commentary in the tech community. A useful critical analysis by Kent Beck (and G. Orosz) exists here: https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/measuring-developer-productivity But, I also think the article has lots of good things to say. I’m grateful and excited…

Send and receive messages instead — Recap In the previous article we explored the idea of passing structured messages to objects: const nameMessage = { type: Name }; const spot = Dog(“Spot”); spot(nameMessage) And we simplified things using functions (with closures) instead of classes: function Dog(name) { const base = Animal(name); return message…

with examples in JavaScript — Object Orientation is often thought of as development using classes. Many languages these days have such a construct. Here’s an example in JavaScript. I’m showing JavaScript because it’s ubiquitous. Most languages will do. class Animal { #name; constructor(name) { this.#name =…

Here’s an experiment for Agile teams. It’s best for teams that are well established. I’ve used a version of this in various teams I’ve led over the years. The idea is to examine reliance on processes which have built up over time. This can benefit by discovering what is good…

Don’t leave your tests behind in the deployment pipeline — As software engineers, we’re taught that we should write tests. Tests to examine our software as it hurtles toward production. They stop us breaking things as we add or change features. As a technical leader, I value that testing code. I spend money making sure that it exists. But we’re…