mike.mainguy

A quick post about my reality: Success is attainable through failure, and tradition is a crutch. I'm amazed at how many people think that they can envision some favorable outcome and attain it on the first try, flawlessly, with no course adjustments. This is as silly as imagining that a child can learn to walk simply by possessing the desire and some careful instruction. From my observation, anything even moderately complex and less automatic than breathing requires trial and error and the most important skill to learn is how to accept failure with open eyes and learn from it. In fact, I'd suggest that a critical part of learning something new is attaining an understanding what failures led to WHY it's done a certain way and not one of a million other ways. Sometimes the answer is buried in history and in fact, there might not even be a great reason for doing it that way anymore. One warning sign I use as my gauge on when this may have happened is when discussing ...

For many people (myself included), creating software is difficult, rewarding, and enjoyable. There is a feeling of pleasure in the act of creating something that is ultimately useful for someone... either for commerce, pleasure, or even the mundane (writing software to keep a deicer working properly...cool... yeah, that's a pun). It's important to keep things in the proper context though, you are not your code, I am not mine, we are not our code, to be effective, we must decouple our ego from our code and embrace Egoless Programming . Software should not be an extension of ourselves because software is much more transient than even we are, it's supposed to be, that's what makes it cool. Technology changes, the state of the art moves forward, patterns evolve, die, reemerge in a new form. In a way, deconstructing what's been done before and reforming it into something new is where the value of solid software development comes from, not from building the "u...

An anti-pattern is a commonly recurring software design pattern that is ineffective or counterproductive. One architectural anti-pattern I've seen a number of times is something I'll call the "Through the Looking Glass" pattern. It's named so because APIs and internal representations are often reflected and defined by their consumers. The core of this pattern is that the software components are split in a manner that couples multiple components in an inappropriate manner. An example is software that is split between a "front end" and a "back end", but they both use the same interfaces and/or value objects to do their work. This causes a situation where almost every back end change requires a front-end change and visa versa. As particularly painful examples, think of using GWT (in general) or trying to use SOAP APIs through javascript. There are a number of other ways this pattern can show up... most often it can be a team structure...

When I stop and look around at work, I notice something that bothers me. Why is the ratio of women to men so low in technology? I've read quite a few posts from women who have lamented the locker room mentality of many technology shops and having been guilty of similar (often cringeworthy) behavior, I can certainly understand why this could be a significant detractor...but it seems like this can't be the sole reason. Only being intimately familiar with the North American technology workplace, I also wonder if this is true globally. I seem to recall on recent visit to a Chinese shop there being a higher number of women in the workplace. I recall a conversation with my daughter from last night that immediately revealed my own bias. Her car was having problems with the cooling system and I asked her if she had fixed it yet (my son and I both took a look and just shrugged). After her reply in the affirmative, I asked if she took it to a mechanic...and she stated "N...