I’ve been a professional programmer now for over a decade, and during this time I’ve met a LOT of excellent programmers. Most of them are partially autodidactic and learned the business side of programming in school. But non of these guru’s/experts use their skills to teach the next generations.

I attended the SATURN 2013 conference in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago, which is an annual practitioner conference about software architecture, organised by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University.

If you take anything away from this cautionary tale it is to constantly be on the look out for those that adhere to the status quo. It takes a certain combination of this quality with an opportunistic personality to cause this sort of organization-wide damage but it does happen.

We’ve got another video in our series on common web app performance problems. This time – we’re looking into how to identify and solve query loop problems. Today we’re going to use TraceView to investigate ORMs and their performance within a PHP application.

The power of the placebo is based on our brain’s belief system. Because we believe the medication can work it does. I wonder if there is some of that placebo effect in our successes with agile? Could it be that all the results are really a matter of proper expectation? It often seems that the software industry is seeking one magic potion after another. We embrace the latest and greatest and hope it will cure our ills. Is agile just the latest elixir?

DDD is not about saving effort "sometime in the future", it provides value by actually speeding up the development effort now. However, not by making us go faster but by helping us find a simpler solution.

Eric Feminella explains how to use the method chaining pattern to both simplify your API and make it more fluent.

At every software development conference, the rooms are filled with speakers wanting to teach you the newest framework or the hottest programming language. And it’s always revolutionary, it’ll always make you 10X more productive, and it’s always a blast to work with. So people learn their frameworks and their languages, but they never take the time to learn basic skills like unit testing, refactoring, object-oriented design or patterns.

Remove bias, Acquire Data.

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Ben Evans explores the idea that many of the characteristics of Feynman’s approach to physics are applicable to programmers, fueling the dream of a world where developers are free to be themselves.