Aleš Roubíček > Aleš's Quotes

“As with threads and locks, actors provide no direct support for parallelism. Parallel solutions need to be built from concurrent building blocks, raising the specter of non-determinism. And because actors do not share state, and can only communicate through message passing, they are not a suitable choice if you need fine-grained parallelism.”
― Anonymous

“That means that a go block compares very favorably to an Elxir process—a very impressive result given that Clojure runs on the JVM, whereas Elixir runs on the Erlang virtual machine, which was built with efficient concurrency in mind.”
― Anonymous

“In his book Tapworthy, author Josh Clark focused on three critical mobile behaviors: micro-tasking, “I’m local,” and “I’m bored.” These align pretty well with Google’s breakdown of mobile users into three behavioral groups: urgent now, repetitive now, and bored now.”
― Anonymous

“Adding another back button in your mobile web experience’s header only confuses things. Someone using the site must ask, “Do both of these back buttons do the same thing?”
― Anonymous

“The smaller your ToDos, the faster you move work across the board. The more you retain your focus. The less multitasking you do.”
― Anonymous

“What data did you notice about the week, what stood out for you? What were your emotional reactions to the week? What made you happy? Where were you challenged? Where were you frustrated? What were your insights? What did you learn? What one or two things will you do based on this week?”
― Anonymous

“Some of the teams who read and applied the first edition of this book didn't get the part of the message about the last responsible moment. They piled story on story as quickly as possible with the least possible investment in design. Without daily attention to design, the cost of changes does skyrocket. The result is poorly designed, brittle, hard-to-change systems.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“If I have the same logic in two places, I work with the design to understand how I can have only one copy. Designs without duplication tend to be easy to change.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Change is not necessarily slow. A team eager or desperate for improvement can progress quickly. It doesn't need to wait long to assimilate one change before moving on to the next practice. If you change too fast, though, you risk slipping back into old practices and values. When this happens, take time to regroup. Remind yourself of the values you want to hold. Review your practices and remind yourself why you chose them. New habits take time to solidify.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Change always starts at home. The only person you can actually change is yourself. No matter how functional or dysfunctional your organization, you can begin applying XP for yourself. Anyone on the team can begin changing his own behavior. Programmers can start writing tests first. Testers can automate their tests. Customers can write stories and set clear priorities. Executives can expect transparency. Dictating practices to a team destroys trust and creates resentment. Executives can encourage team responsibility and accountability. Whether the team produces these with XP, a better waterfall, or utter chaos is up to them. Using XP, teams can produce dramatic improvements in the areas of defects, estimation, and productivity.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“I've sat through far too many "crying in the beer" sessions where all the energy for change was dissipated in the intensity of the complaining. Once you see an idea for improvement that makes sense to you, do it.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Don't make more versions of your source code. Rather than add more code bases, fix the underlying design problem that is preventing you from running from a single code base.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Write contracts for software development that fix time, costs, and quality but call for an ongoing negotiation of the precise scope of the system. Reduce risk by signing a sequence of short contracts instead of one long one.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“A team using the information provided by pay-per-use should be able to do a more effective job than a team relying for feedback only on license revenues.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Customers may have a good idea of the general behavior they want to see, but testers are good at looking at "happy paths" and asking what should happen if something goes wrong. "Okay, but what if login fails three times? What should happen then?" In this role testers amplify communication.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“To achieve this his team had a sophisticated stress testing environment. When they wanted to improve the architecture they would first improve the stress tests until the system broke. Then they would improve the architecture just enough to run the tests. I suggested this strategy to an architect at another company. He complained of spending all of his time writing specifications and then explaining them to developers.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“The XP philosophy is to start where you are now and move towards the ideal. From where you are now, could you improve a little bit?”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Given the choice between an extremely skilled loner and a competent-but-social programmer, XP teams consistently choose the more social candidate. The best interviewing technique is to have the candidate work with the team for a day. Pair programming provides an excellent test of technical and social skills.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“The constraint has shifted out of software development. Here's a sad but repeated story: a development team begins applying XP, dramatically improves quality and productivity, but then is disbanded, its leaders fired and the rest of the team scattered.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Without planning, we are individuals with haphazard connections and effectiveness. We are a team when we plan and work in harmony.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“If you have a month to plan a project in detail, spend it on four one-week iterations developing while you improve your estimates. If you have a week to plan a project, hold five one-day iterations. Feedback cycles give you information and the experience to make accurate estimates.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Saying that programmers should just accomplish twice as much doesn't work. They can gain skills and effectiveness, but they cannot get more done on demand. More time at the desk does not equal increased productivity for creative work.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Inaccurate estimates are a failure of information, not of values or principles. If the numbers are wrong, fix the numbers and communicate the consequences.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Without the adjustment, you are working under a lie. Everyone knows it and has to hide to protect themselves. This is no way to get good software done and deployed;”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Cards on a wall is a way of practicing transparency, valuing and respecting the input of each team member. The project manager has the task of translating the cards into whatever format is expected by the rest of the organization.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“However, most defects end up costing more than it would have cost to prevent them. Defects are expensive when they occur, both the direct costs of fixing the defects and the indirect costs because of damaged relationships, lost business, and lost development time.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Trust energizes participants. We feel good when things work smoothly. We need to be safe to experiment and make mistakes. We need testing to bring accountability to our experimentation so that we can be sure we are doing no harm.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Beta testing is a symptom of weak testing practices and poor communication with customers.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“If there are forms of testing, like stress and load testing, that find defects after development is "complete," bring them into the development cycle. Run load and stress tests continuously and automatically.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change

“Folk wisdom in software development teaches that interfaces shouldn't be unduly influenced by implementations. Writing a test first is a concrete way to achieve this separation.”
― Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change