From JavaZone 2015, Christin Gorman presents How to make your code sustainable – what they don’t teach you.
The presentation was at a Java conference, but it’s pertinent to most programming projects (it also validates why I want to code by myself):
Join me for some ranting about how best practices from open source development and project management school is making your sustaining team miserable.
I dare say most projects start off with a goal of producing code that is easy to maintain for the sustaining crew. But as developers are too often split into either pure development teams or pure sustaining teams, not many in the development teams get to experience what sustaining is actually like.
Many seemingly good ideas that are great in the developing phase, make life more difficult in sustaining. Many things that are essential for a good library or framework, are harmful when applied to application development.
I want to share some concrete examples and hopefully inspire you all to write applications that is easier for others to work with.
Terms like “best practices” and “future-proofing software” can mean different things to different people based on context, and this video sheds some light on how sustaining teams will hate your code and how you can simplify it. She also talks about how software constraints and restricting users can become burdensome to your codebase.
(via @christingorman)
