Rebuilding my Developer Platform – For the Last Time!

I have finished enough of a ground-up rebuild of a developer machine to take stock. The rebuild process went something like this:

Step 1 – Start long running installation

Step 2 – Wait for installation to complete

Step 3 – Go back to Step 1. Rinse and repeat …

Hard Learnt Lessons

• Building a Windows based developer workstation takes more TIME than you imagine

• Long periods of WAITING for installations to complete is WASTEFUL

• Rebuilding workstation machines is REPETITIVE

One more point on the the manual build process. I will never have to do it again!

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Wtf is Amber? Release only on a Green Build

Sounds completely sensible.

Why would you do anything else? That would just incur unnecessary risk surely?

No, we would definitely not do that.

Yes you would, and from what I see, in surprisingly large numbers too.

TODO Comments have no place in Master

Don’t get me wrong, as a professional C# developer I love using TODO markers in my code. They document minor details that I need to revisit and allow me as a coder to keep moving with the aim of getting an overall structure in place. I do this in feature branches and I often do a git rebase -i to tidy up all of my local commits into something more meaningful to merge back into the develop or master branch.

As you are reading this I hope that you will agree with the next few points that I make about source code best practices. So here are my views on what I believe to be a sensible perspective on how you treat releasable code.

If the Dev Team fails to own the Build

You are dead in the water.

As a developer friend likes to say, these people are Zombies. They are dead but just don’t know it yet.

Don’t Give Me No Blue Sky Rubbish

I’ve read a fair number of books on software development over the years but the one that has made the most difference to me was I. M. Wright’s ‘Hard Code’. Amazon’s summary states ‘Get the brutal truth about coding, testing, and project management—from a Microsoft insider who tells it like it is’. Fair comment.

Back in the day we had Ed Yourdon telling us all about  Death March  projects and Steve McConnell‘s Code Complete as a self defense guide to how to avoid getting stuck on one.

These days I’ve got Eric Brechner’s blog to provide me with an up-to-date insight into the software development process and it’s incumbant pitfalls. Eric’s hard bitten perspective and practical advice ought to provide enough ammunition for even the most jaded Dilbert devotee to start sorting out their:

• Career
• Project
• Manager [sic]
• Department / Company

IMHO if ‘Hard Code’ doesn’t speak to you, you’re most likely in the wrong industry.

One final cautionary note, the ‘Hard Code’ blog doesn’t deal in ‘Blue Sky Thinking’ and offers little to those looking to ‘Land their Vision’, those individuals best look elsewhere for what they seek.