As a consultant I see so many companies using the latest and greatest buzzwords, forking out staggering amounts of cash for hardware and tooling and generally throwing anything they can at the wall to see what sticks.
The problem? Their teams still struggle to produce high-quality output and are often incurring unsustainable technical debt. Codebases are still impossible to navigate and there’s always that underlying dread that one day soon someone is going to discover what a mess everything is.
How can this happen? It wasn’t supposed to be this hard! Don’t we all know all this stuff by now?
Let’s take a look at some patterns and practices to reduce the cognitive load of navigating a codebase, maintaining existing features and adding new ones, and all while shipping high-quality products. Fast.
Here’s a version of Back to basics: simple, elegant, beautiful code that I delivered at DDD Brisbane 2015.
My name is Andrew Harcourt.
I do Head of Technology/Engineering, Consultant CTO and other similarly-shaped work with companies large and small. I specialise in project rescue, governance and development methodologies.
I'm a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks, a co-founder at Stack Mechanics, one of the organisers of the DDD Brisbane conference and, in my spare time (ha!), I also run my own photography business, Ivory Digital.
My main areas of interest are domain-driven design, event sourcing, massively-scalable service architectures and large-scale, high-load, geographically-distributed systems.
I'm a regular speaker and presenter at conferences and training events. My mother wrote COBOL on punch cards and I've been coding in one form or another since I was five years old.
I have a number of open-source creations, including Nimbus, ConfigInjector and NotDeadYet, and am an occasional contributor to several more.
Cyclist. Photographer. Ballroom dancer. Motorcyclist. Occasional sailor. Lapsed fencer.