Kyle Cordes

We use SVN on a project with a lot of small branches, i.e. a branch for almost every non-trivial feature. This is not a particularly pleasant want to use SVN, but it meets another important need for our project: code review on the way in to the trunk (as a “gate”), rather than code review […]

As anyone with experience in a large firm knows, change control procedures (and “change control boards”) are a common fixture. Change control mechanisms (such as requiring extensive documentation, signatures, meetings, checklists, approvals, etc.) have obvious benefits, but they also add inertia, increasing the cost of change. This refers to both dollar costs (meetings aren’t free), […]

Brian Button recently suggested, for XPSTL, “a series of presentations where we discuss the biggest challenges we, as team members and developers for the most part, face in our day-to-day jobs with respect to being agile. The challenges can be in technical areas, organizational change issues, or whatever else people think is hard.”
I’ll bite.
First, some […]

Here is an idea I picked up at AYE and again at ETech; I mentioned it at the Ruby UG last month, and am writing it up here to encourage its use.
A common problem at growing and changing groups of people (such as user group members, conference attendees who see each other rarely, etc.), is […]

Last night at XPSTL, John Sextro gave a talk on the “Move Embellishment to Decorator” refactoring as described in Joshua Kerievsky’s Refactoring to Patterns book. I greatly enjoyed and benefitted from the original Design Patterns book (from the Gang of Four) which was already old (published 1994) when I heard about it and bought […]

This evening at XPSTL, Michael Feathers (blog) (book) was in from out of town (and from around the world) and gave a talk on API design. He’s been thinking a lot about API design recently, driven by issues that come up with working with legacy code, which talks to lots of APIs, to cajole […]