While watching Season 1 of Westworld, I spent the entire time annoying my wife. I would bug her about the anti-patterns I saw the software teams at Westworld using. Of course, the anti-patterns were for dramatic effect. It wouldn’t be interesting if everything went right. But, since it’s rife with bad practices it can be a good […]
Category Archives: software development
Sabremetrics for Software Teams
“He’s got the look of a ballplayer.” That phrase was enough to make a purchasing decision in the millions. That changed with Sabremetrics. Sabremetrics is a series of a statistics designed by Bill James in the 70s. It has transformed baseball but was ignored for 40 years. James figured out that statistics we used to […]
Molasses! A feature toggle library for Elixir
Early this year when I read about Erlang in Seven Languages In Seven Weeks, I mentioned that Elixir was a language I intended to explore this year. At Maxwell Health, we also started to investigate Elixir for new projects because we wanted a functional language in our arsenal and we liked it’s concurrency story. So […]
Antidote
As of data released yesterday, the state of Massachusetts loses 5 people a day to opioid overdose. The whole nation is facing an epidemic, young people are dying at an alarming rate and more people becoming addicted to opioids every day. Naloxone is a drug that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose and saves […]
TV Pilots are a treasure trove of data
A few months ago, I did a little weekend project of looking at TV comedy pilot scripts. For those unfamiliar with the concept, when a television show is being developed a network will order a pilot episode as a test to see if it will pick it up for a full season. As a result, […]
Seven Languages in Seven Weeks By Bruce Tate
Full disclosure: I didn’t fully embrace this book, I didn’t do the exercises at the end of each chapter. For most of the languages, I don’t even have them installed on my computer. Ok, It feels good to admit that. With that disclosed, I will say Seven Languages In Seven Weeks was a treat. Of […]
Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation By Jez Humble
Hopefully, more books I read this year will have an impact on my day to day life, but at the very least this one definitely will. Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble was suggested to me by our VP of engineering along with Release It By Michael Nygard which I read last year. Both cover the […]