(Previously published on DZone)
In four years, the Agile Manifesto will celebrate its silver jubilee. I want to devote another post to these sensible recommendations you find hanging in poster format on office walls the world over. Agile as a noun has become solidified in the established practice of software development to the point where many treat its values as if descended from Mount Sinai on stone tablets. They are not eternal truths and can make no such claims. They were written when Perl/CGI was the go-to stack for web apps. Agility encompasses adaptability, so the values themselves must be constantly re-evaluated and questioned.

The Agile Manifesto summarizes its values and principles on a single sheet of paper. The Scrum Guide needs more space, but it’s still concise enough to be called a summary. That needn’t be a problem. Many complex cooking recipes fit on a single page. But Agile, however you define it, can at best only be a set of ideas and values, never a recipe or how-to guide for building great software – Scrum doesn’t even talk about software. That’s why the agile method is a deceptive term. The Oxford dictionary definition of method resembles that of a recipe quite well: “A particular procedure for accomplishing or approaching something, especially a systematic or established one”. It’s funny that the entry should give a method for software maintenance as an example. The lexicographer probably thought refactoring is like plastering a ceiling: something hard that requires skill, but no originality or imagination.

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Previously published on Dzone

My last Java certification is the SCJP 6 from 2010, so when the OCP 17 came out, I thought it high time for a refresher. I am setting aside an hour every day when I’m at my brightest, which is after coffee and before breakfast. I’ll share my personal study tips later, but it’s more credible if I first pass the exam. So, I found another topic to distract me from my studies that I want to dwell on. It’s the effect that modern IDEs and resources like Stack Overflow are having on our brains. Once you dig into the 900+ pages of schoolwork that is the OCP Study Guide, you’re painfully reminded that they have been making us lazy and maybe even a bit stupid. 

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I started my programming career without a proper computer science qualification, which wasn’t exceptional in the Netherlands in the wild years preceding the dotcom boom. A sensible dose of the impostor syndrome and a lucky sense of how best to fill the knowledge gaps has stood me in good stead. Starting out as a glorified amateur myself, I have always sympathized with the poor end user, perhaps out of a sense of my own bewilderment with all this needless complexity. I was an early fan of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox column, who started writing about (web) usability since the nineties.

I don’t think there has ever been a time when computers and software had the same gentle learning curve as using a toaster. Certainly not in the 1950s, when programmer and user were the same person, i.e., an engineer. Dedicated systems remained far from idiot proof long after that and took considerable (memorization) skills to master. Before barcode scanners became common, checkout operators at German ALDI supermarkets had to enter all prices from memory (items had no price tags). It must have been a steep learning curve, but it sure was fast! Such mental feats were required less than a generation ago for a job we would now classify as unskilled labour.

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Previously published on DZone

In a recent article, I argued that it is becoming even harder to be a credible full stack developer, one who is sufficiently up to date to contribute to every stage of developing a modern web- and/or mobile-based application. You’re not expected to build it all by yourself, obviously, but given enough time and with a little help from Stack Overflow, you could.

Such requirements were not unrealistic in the year 2000. In a typical LAMP-stack app (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl) you hand-coded most of your HTML and CSS. JavaScript was still optional and frameworks that kept all presentation concerns on the browser had yet to arrive. The backend created the views and besides a few indispensable modules (CGI, DB), standard Perl did the trick. 

True, a battle was raging between competing web “standards,” with proprietary goodies like Explorer’s marquee tag and Netscape’s layers. But otherwise, the stack was reassuringly stable and manageable. The necessary tools on your belt didn’t weigh you down. And we just built simpler things back then, before the internet became indispensable. Today’s demands for scaling and security are much higher.

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