Maturity model for service monitoring

Over the years I've encountered organizations and individuals that all have different levels of service monitoring maturity. I figured it was time to talk a little about these. And by monitoring I mean the things you look at to understand the health of a service. And I'm especially considering how good vs bad health is quickly determined.

Object Calisthenics and Domain Modeling

Several times before I've covered how object calisthenics can save you so naturally I'm happy to see yet another example. This time referenced to as domain modeling which is probably a better approach than talking about calisthenics since that is a work many of us have no idea what it means...

A Swede's guide to US health insurance

When I moved from Sweden to the US the scariest unknown was how health insurance worked. And I must say that it is mind boggling at times. In my six years in the US I have experienced three different approaches. The short version is that if you consider moving to the US, make sure you understand how your health insurance works!

Software Development in different cultures

I was listening to this podcast which is talking about how the culture at different software companies is different in different parts of the world. I found it extra intriguing to hear how foreigners perceived working in Scandinavia vs their home countries since I've done the opposite journey.

Thinking for Programmers

I was watching this great recording from last year on how programmers should think. It talks a lot about the importance of writing a specification for your code.

What to do with a caught exception

Some people like exceptions and some don't. Some people like them for exceptional things. Regardless of what type you are there is also a debate about what you do with that exception once you catch it.

These are not the abstractions you are looking for

People around me often hear me mumble things like "I think we are missing a level of abstraction here". This is something that often happens when I help people understand how to efficiently unit test a piece of code. But right before Christmas I was working in some code that perfectly highlighted that all abstractions are not equal.

The I have no idea what I'm testing anti-pattern.

It is no secret that I'm not a big fan of service locators in general, but even if you are a fan of those there is a pattern I really don't want to see in unit tests. I will call this the I-have-no-idea-what-I-am-testing-anti-pattern.

2014 statistics

So what did you enjoy in 2014. Here are the truth based on statistics.

A kingdom for a developer

So this happened a few years ago in the days between Christmas and New Year. I was using the slow days after Christmas to get some work done in the office when suddenly a guy from the operations team came running down the hallways shouting "a developer, a developer, a kingdom for a developer"!