“Uncle Bob” is Robert Martin of CleanCoder. You may have heard of the Agile Alliance, Extreme Programming, and the SOLID principles. That’s “Uncle Bob”.

Your new CTO

Uncle Bob as your new CTO has some expectations.

• There’s the “programming ear”
• There’s the “everyone else in the world ear”

• These two think differently about the same things

• How many programmers are in the world? In 1946 there is 1, now there are 100,000,000.
• That’s 27 doublings?
• Maybe doubles every 5 years now.
• More than half have less that five years experience.
• We are in a state of perpetual inexperience.
• Professors in college are 10 years behind
• Most professors have never written a line of code for pay

What we might profess

• We will not ship shit.
  • When you release code, you know it works.
  • It will be as high as quality code as it can be in the time given.
  • Mercury space program had a “sprint” length of one day
• You do not slow down with product age. “Stable productivity”
  • code messes cause slowness.
• Inexpensive adaptability
  • hard to change software might as well be hardware
• Continuous improvement
• Fearless competence
  • People change code to minimize their personal risk, not improve the system
  • Shouldn’t be afraid to touch the code.
  • The “Fragile Test Problem”
    • tests are an integral part of the system and must be accountable for
• We will not dump on QA
• Honest estimates

Also in this series

• Lesson 1 - Clean Code
• Lesson 2 - Comments
• Lesson 3 - Professionalism
• Lesson 4 - Test Driven Development
• Lesson 5 - Good Software Architecture
• Lesson 6 - Production vs. Development