Top all-time · #1526
Alistair Cockburn
Personal blog · alistair.cockburn.usprogrammingcareerwriting
Alistair Cockburn's personal blog at alistair.cockburn.us covers programming, career and writing. Since 2008, 50 different Hacker News readers have linked it 66 times, most often “Hexagonal Architecture”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Dr. Alistair Cockburn jump page
Most-linked posts?
- Hexagonal Architecture9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2022-04-12
- Hexagonal architecture8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2013-01-03
- /ASD+book+extract%3A+%22Naur,+Ehn,+Musashi%224 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-09-07
- Characterizing people as non-linear 1st order components in software development3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-07-21
- Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in soft development3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-02-21
- Shu Ha Ri2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-12-28
- The magic of pi for project managers2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-01-31
What Hacker News says?
I think the 'Layered Architecture' section is all over the place. There are a lot of terms thrown around with pretty loose definitions - in this article and others. I had to look up "layered architecture" to see what other people wrote about it, and it looks like an anti-pattern to me: In a four-layered architecture, the layers are typically divided into: Presentation Application Domain Infrastructure These layers a…
Comment linking /hexagonal-architecture/
on “Cognitive load is what matters”Submitted Characterizing people as non-linear 1st order components in software development as a story · 61 points
HN discussionI'm glad to hear this works for you. But I think the process emphasizes technical skills over what really matters when hiring: how the person works with the team and within the business. Giving someone a toy project unrelated to the business tells you nothing about how they will perform in the real environment. Letting the candidate take the work home to work on it in isolation tells you nothing about how they will…
Comment linking /People+and+methodologies+in+software+development
on “A Method I’ve Used to Eliminate Bad Tech Hires”Submitted Hexagonal architecture as a story · 29 points
HN discussionI don't think we are agreeing or disagreeing. I do want tools that make it easier to navigate and understand code and I also want cultural shifts in programmer communities that lead to better software overall. I'm just saying the communal aspect is more important than any given programmer's ability to navigate code but the two are obviously intertwined in complicated ways. That article you linked to ( http://alistai…
Comment linking /ASD+book+extract%3A+%22Naur,+Ehn,+Musashi%22
on “New Requests for Startups”Submitted Hexagonal Architecture as a story · 15 points
HN discussionAs it happens, I've been working on something like that. Still pretty half-baked, but send me an email and I'll show you what I have. Email in profile. "There are so many times where, if I could sit down with the original program author for 5 - 10 minutes, I could understand more from that interactive back-and-forth than several hours of reading code in solitude." Peter Naur wrote a paper in 1985 where he conjecture…
Comment linking /ASD+book+extract%3A+%22Naur,+Ehn,+Musashi%22
on “New Requests for Startups”Submitted Kent Beck predicted continuous delivery in 2000 as a story · 14 points
HN discussion"estimate and multiply by 10" Reminds me of these rules: - Multiply by π for small, known teams, doing a new job, - by π^2 for unknown teams, - and √π for known teams who have already started, know their work and have a good track record. From http://alistair.cockburn.us/The+magic+of+pi+for+project+mana...
Comment linking /The+magic+of+pi+for+project+managers
on ““It’s done, there is no way back. We tried, we failed””Submitted How “Learn Early, Learn Often” Takes Us Beyond Risk Reduction (2013) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionThe CASE motivated tooling got in the way. My go to joke: RationalRose is like an 800lb angry gorilla sitting between you and your work. Alistair Cockburn did a great post mortem about that era. Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development [1999] http://alistair.cockburn.us/Characterizing+people+as+non-lin... During that time, I strongly preferred lo-fi paper prototyping for UI…
Comment linking /Characterizing+people+as+non-linear%2c+first-order+components+in+software+development
on “Scrum disempowers developers”Submitted Programmer productivity as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI think there's some arguing past each other in discussion of this. You've seen some terrible programmers who don't write unit tests, and I (and others) have seen terrible programmers that do write (terrible) unit tests. Tests that mock everything and test nothing. Tests that assert bad implementation details but not important results. Huge volumes of terrible tests that are a huge burden. I agree, having some good…
Comment linking /Characterizing+people+as+non-linear,+first-order+components+in+software+development/v/slim
on “Why Most Unit Testing is Waste (2014) [pdf]”Submitted Nonlinear people and catastrophe theory as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMany of the advantages of microservices can be achieved by refactoring your monolith code to be less monolithic. I would suggest using functional styles wherever possible, plenty of isolated unit testable code, and a hexagonal architecture http://alistair.cockburn.us/Hexagonal+architecture that pushes all the I/O, mutation, side effects, etc. to the very boundary of your code. Also see Gary Bernhardt's "Boundaries"…
Comment linking /Hexagonal+architecture
on “The microservices cargo cult”Submitted We think so slowly because the mind is a meme garden as a story · 4 points
HN discussionPsychologically, you become conservative to avoid breaking lots of tests. Psychologically, the FIRST problem is that there is a distinct separation in his head between "working" code and "test" code. They are essentially married together. "Breaking tests" is simply identifying now-broken functionality that would NOT have been highlighted had he made the change WITHOUT that test coverage. Basically, I don't understan…
Comment linking /Hexagonal+architecture
on “Giving up on test-first development”Submitted Using natural language as a metaphoric base for object-oriented modeling [1992] as a story · 3 points
HN discussioni've said this before (sorry), but cockburn, in cooperative game, describes shu ha ri - http://alistair.cockburn.us/Shu+Ha+Ri - as three stages of mastering something: following, detaching and fluent. anyway, this post is so second stage it makes me wince.
Comment linking /Shu+Ha+Ri
on “Most lives are lived by default”Submitted Alastair Cockburn's Theory of Software Development [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe Agile Methodology is to argue about The Agile Methodology. -- The only durable thing I've learned about methodologies: Alistair Cockburn "Characterizing People as Non-linear, First Order Components in Software Development." Oops. https://alistair.cockburn.us is "under construction". Sorry. Meanwhile, here's a pretty good TL;DR: http://www.johngoodpasture.com/2009/11/people-puzzle-non-lin... Anywho. My current po…
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on “The Waterfall methodology was a historic accident and they knew it”Submitted Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in soft development as a story · 3 points
HN discussionwhat he's saying is similar to cockburn's take on shu ha ri, and you might find that makes more sense - http://alistair.cockburn.us/Shu+Ha+Ri (i prefer it - i don't disagree with zed shaw's appeal for simplicity, but i think cockburn's approach shows that simplicity is only possible by passing through complexity)
Comment linking /Shu+Ha+Ri
on “The Master, The Expert, The Programmer”Submitted Why I became a Certified Scrum Trainer and why I stopped as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe truth is that there is a lot of evidence from the field that having good developers and zero formal process is actually fairly workable, and often produces results. For certain kind of organisations yes. Take a look at the research Alistair Cockburn did and his various Crystal [colourname] methodologies. http://alistair.cockburn.us/Crystal+methodologies It's typically not the best system, but it's a strong antid…
Comment linking /Crystal+methodologies
on “Why I'm done with Scrum”Submitted Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development as a story · 2 points
HN discussionStart with the "classics" like "mystical man month" (Brooks) for example, then get many of the books by Tom de Marco and possibly read Richard Gabriel's "Patterns of Software". The book about the "Chandler" project (forgot it's title) is also a particular good read. Those two in particular are interesting reads about why things fail. Go on to reading the Toyota management style in itself, there's a couple of books a…
Comment linking /Characterizing+people+as+non-linear%2c+first-order+components+in+software+development
on “Ask HN: Dev promoted to more strategic role in startup. What literature?”Submitted Ports and Adapters (2005) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA tale: http://alistair.cockburn.us/Thinking+before+programming
Comment linking /Thinking+before+programming
on “Modern Extreme Programming”Submitted Hexagonal Architecture as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
