As a developer, how difficult is it to choose between innovating in an untested market vs. going with a safe rehash in a tried-and-true market?
This is the question of the hour these days, with so many players up in a frenzy over lack of industry innovation in the AAA market. So many developers are honestly just trying to put something out there that can generate income while simultaneously entertaining the masses.
I’ve long worried about "Best Practices." Sure, I usually play along at the time, but lurking in the back of my mind, waiting for a suitable opportunity are two questions:
I was once told by someone from the oil industry that it was common for contracts to specify "best practice" should be used. But seldom was the actual practice specified. Instead, each party to the contract would interpret best practice as they wished, until something went wrong. At that point, after an accident, after money was lost, they would go to court and a judge would decide what was best practice.
Every year, new trends evolve in the design industry and it’s important to keep up with the latest trends and transitions in the design industry. Let’s have a look what will be a big hit in future.
Minimalistic design is a process of keeping spotlight on the invaluable content and getting away with the valueless clutter. Here the focus is more on the content rather than the end look and to achieve this goal designers follow some visual design principles.
What is User Experience Design? Why does it matter? Many people have absolutely no idea about what a UX Designer really does. Some have an idea, but they’re wrong about the function of UX and UI. That’s why we asked Maria, our UX Designer, to explain a few essential things about the field.
Well, for me personally, it’s the satisfaction of the work that drives me. UX Design means interesting projects, learning new things every day as well as the possibility to meet new interesting people.
Writing good code in accordance with all the best practices is often overrated. But is it really? Writing good and clean code is just like good habits which will come with time and practice.
We always give excuses to continue with our patent non-efficient bad code, reasons like no time for best practices, meeting the deadlines, angry boss, tired of the project, etc. Most of the time we try to procrastinate by saying will make it efficient and clean later but that time never comes.
Bad code is not problematic for us to understand but for the other developers who will handle that after us.
So, let me get you to the points by Robert C. Martin in his captivating book Clean Code.
When your heroes start acting weird, you reexamine their influence on your life. I’ve long been learning, demonstrating and teaching clean code through TDD, patterns, and so on. But when I look back, I am now worried that the ideas negatively influence my life and my work and that of others.
Many who know me consider me an exceptionally skilled programmer. I got that way because I have often spent my evenings practicing programming techniques and technologies. I often leave the office 1-2 hours later than my co-workers after polishing some piece of ultimately meaningless code. This is time I don’t spend with my family. Because I’ve learned to care about Clean Code.
Virtual collaboration is an excellent alternative to time-sucking in-person meetings, but few people recognize it as a viable option. That’s a shame – because people love to hate meetings.
“Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.” – Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith
I was thinking about the impact of knowledge and risk on software development the other day and had a thought about the effectiveness of analysis in Scrum projects. We all know that when we begin a new development project, knowledge is at the least and risk is at the greatest. This is true regardless of project methodology. The cone of uncertainty is a great way to describe these forces. The area inside the cone is uncertainty or risk. As the project progresses, the level of uncertainty and risk is reduced until the project is complete and there is no longer any uncertainty — only delivered code.
However, I find it interesting to look at the area outside the cone as well. This area is certainty or knowledge. We can see that as the project progresses, knowledge increases until the project is complete and knowledge is maximized as the code is delivered. This is intuitive and makes good sense to those who run projects and live with the results.
Whenever I teach Agile approaches, I discuss the possible meetings a team might choose. Some people turn to me in dismay. They start adding up all the meeting time and say, "That’s a lot of meetings."
Could be. Especially if you use iterations. You might have these meetings:
"To simplify yields a richer result." — Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing
This is one of my favorite quotes of all time. Throughout life, I am constantly learning through trial and error. And I have found that the simple process often leads to the better product. For instance, my barbecue chicken recipe. I love summer and enjoy spending time with friends and family barbecuing. I have a simple recipe that is my go-to, but I’ll often try to shake things up with new sauces, rub mixtures, or brines. Turns out that my simple recipe with a minimal amount of ingredients is always the crowd favorite.
