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Ron Jeffries

Personal blog · ronjeffries.comprogrammingcareer

Ron Jeffries's personal blog at ronjeffries.com covers programming and career. Since 2015, 68 different Hacker News readers have linked it 138 times, most often “We Tried Baseball and It Didn't Work (2006)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-22, and you can follow it by feed.

Visit the blog
138mentions?
68HN people?
2015–2026first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 20 in 2018

This is RonJeffries.com, the combination of new articles, XProgramming, SameElephant, and perhaps even some new items never before contemplated. Copyright © 1998-forever Ronald E Jeffries

Most-linked posts?

  1. We Tried Baseball and It Didn't Work (2006)
    6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-04-04
  2. Dark Scrum (2016)
    6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-09-14
  3. "I may have invented story points, and if I did, I'm sorry now" (2019)
    6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-05-23
  4. Refactoring – Not on the backlog (2014)
    5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-07-24
  5. Developers Should Abandon Agile
    4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-05-10
  6. /xprog/articles/oksudoku/
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-09-04
  7. Scrum: Twice the Effort All the Time
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-06-05
  8. A New Improved Ant
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-05-26
  9. TDD
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-11-24
  10. Incremental Development
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-03-13

What Hacker News says?

  1. dwd · 2019-09-06
    For a proper discussion I'm surprised no one has mentioned this principle from Extreme Programming possibly predates Google as a company. https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/practices/pracnotneed...

    Comment linking /xprog/articles/practices/pracnotneed/

    on “How to do a code review”
  2. ingve · 2016-06-24

    Submitted My God, it's full of yaks as a story · 184 points

    HN discussion
  3. engrsrce · 2020-04-30
    Well that's pretty naive. I've worked with some pretty good teams that wouldn't work any other way. I suspect you've only worked at places that abused agile as described here... https://ronjeffries.com/articles/language-of-hatred/

    Comment linking /articles/language-of-hatred/

    on “Rules of thumb for a 1x developer”
  4. DeathArrow · 2021-10-12

    Submitted We Tried Baseball and It Didn't Work (2006) as a story · 153 points

    HN discussion
  5. willvarfar · 2017-06-29
    No article about TDD, particularly one that shouts out to the respected Ron Jeffries http://ronjeffries.com/ , is complete without mentioning the TDD Sudoku Fiasco :) Ravi has a nice summary: http://ravimohan.blogspot.se/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-so... Peter Norvig's old-fashioned approach is excellent counterbalance: http://norvig.com/sudoku.html

    Comment linking /

    on “TDD did not live up to expectations”
  6. mborch · 2026-09-11

    Submitted Resist "AI" as a story · 65 points

    HN discussion
  7. unclebobmartin · 2025-03-03
    Ah, yes. The famous Sudoku solver controversy. In 2006 Ron Jeffries wrote four blogs about solving Sudoku in Ruby with TDD. His blogging effort ended before he completed the solution. I think he got interested in something else and left the whole thing hanging. That same year Peter Norvig wrote a Sudoku solver in Python using a constraint based approach. You can see their respective documents here. https://ronjeffri…

    Comment linking /categories/sudoku/%E2%80%A6

    on “Clean Code vs. A Philosophy Of Software Design”
  8. ingve · 2018-05-10

    Submitted Developers Should Abandon Agile as a story · 62 points

    HN discussion
  9. nutheracc · 2016-08-08
    NoEstimates: http://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/the-noestimates-moveme...

    Comment linking /xprog/articles/the-noestimates-movement/

    on “Why I'm not a big fan of Scrum”
  10. ingve · 2021-10-15

    Submitted Jira: Razor Blades? as a story · 23 points

    HN discussion
  11. byron_fast · 2018-10-03
    Don't think, just set the halt. https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/practices/pracjustset...

    Comment linking /xprog/articles/practices/pracjustsetthehalt/

    on “Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?”
  12. dhorthy · 2026-01-05

    Submitted Refactoring – Not on the backlog (2014) as a story · 15 points

    HN discussion
  13. struppi · 2018-05-30
    If you do Scrum like that, you're doing it wrong (I know, no true Sctosman [1], and I know, there are actually dark patterns [2]). I wrote a whole book about "Agile Anti-Patterns" [3]. Most of the book's content is about things that many companies get wrong when they start with agile or lean software development. Because it is very easy to get those things wrong. Yes, those problems are extremely common. Not only wi…

    Comment linking /articles/018-01ff/hills-to-die-on/

    on “Scrum disempowers developers”
  14. onlydole · 2016-09-13

    Submitted Dark Scrum as a story · 13 points

    HN discussion
  15. evouga · 2022-08-18
    Huh? Ron Jeffries is a champion of TDD (see for instance https://ronjeffries.com/articles/019-01ff/tdd-one-word/ ). He most certainly wasn't deliberately implementing Sudoku in a stupid way to make TDD look bad!

    Comment linking /articles/019-01ff/tdd-one-word/

    on “I have complicated feelings about TDD”
  16. ABS · 2015-03-24

    Submitted Extreme Programming Revived? as a story · 10 points

    HN discussion
  17. reedlaw · 2021-08-28
    One of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, Ron Jeffries, suggests developers abandon the word Agile [1]. Instead, we should recommend and practice "Manifesto Agile". 1. https://ronjeffries.com/articles/018-01ff/abandon-1/

    Comment linking /articles/018-01ff/abandon-1/

    on “Mental health impacts of a big tech job”
  18. srijan4 · 2019-07-07

    Submitted Yagni, Yes. Skimping, No. Technical Debt? Not Even as a story · 8 points

    HN discussion
  19. arendtio · 2018-10-24
    I always knew that Scrum wasn't as agile as some people want to tell you, but this was the first time I read about 'Dark Scrum' [1]. In my opinion, Scrum is a good tool to kickstart the process of becoming an agile organization, but too often the process languishes there and generates a lot of frustration. [1]: https://ronjeffries.com/articles/016-09ff/defense/

    Comment linking /articles/016-09ff/defense/

    on “The State of Agile Software in 2018”
  20. lobo_tuerto · 2021-06-11

    Submitted Refactoring – Not on the Backlog as a story · 6 points

    HN discussion
  21. towelrod · 2024-12-19
    Yes, but remember the much more important rules of programming: You aren't gonna to need it[1] Do the simplest thing that can possibly work[2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_aren%27t_gonna_need_it 2. https://www.ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/practices/pracsim...

    Comment linking /xprog/articles/practices/pracsimplest/

    on “How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect”
  22. ingve · 2015-07-31

    Submitted Steve McConnell on #NoEstimates as a story · 6 points

    HN discussion
  23. mannykannot · 2019-09-04
    Do you mean the series of posts linked to from the one you give, beginning with [1]? They are an excellent demonstration of two of the pitfalls of naive TDD: 1) The things you can test first (before you have figured out the central problem) are not necessarily the things that matter most. The author should have addressed the algorithm for solving the puzzle first; everything else is secondary. 2) This is an example…

    Comment linking /xprog/articles/oksudoku/

    on “Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle (2006)”
  24. jruohonen · 2025-04-19

    Submitted Thoughts: XP Revisited as a story · 5 points

    HN discussion
  25. moron4hire · 2025-09-23
    Norvig mentions it in the article linked in the post to which you are replying. The game was Sudoku. The person was Ron Jeffries. https://ronjeffries.com/articles/-z022/01121/sudoku-again/

    Comment linking /articles/-z022/01121/sudoku-again/

    on “Testing is better than data structures and algorithms”
  26. notRobot · 2024-08-09

    Submitted "I may have invented story points, and if I did, I'm sorry now" (2019) as a story · 5 points

    HN discussion
  27. mcguire · 2016-06-25
    Before you start trying to draw conclusions about the general state of development, consider that Mr. Jeffries... " Some further very simple tweak, which I no longer remember, and the test ran … and did nothing. That’s not too surprising, I guess, because there’s no if __name__ == '__main__': " which, I believe, means that no one calls the testrunner. " You’re supposed to know that! " ...is also the fellow who had s…

    Comment linking /xprog/articles/oksudoku/

    on “My God, it's full of yaks”
  28. ingve · 2016-09-11

    Submitted Dark Scrum as a story · 5 points

    HN discussion
  29. charles_f · 2019-08-07
    Article seems to identify main reasons as either poor implementation, or poor change management. Funny how much this reminds me of capital-A-gile, and Jeffries "we've tried baseball"[0] - we've implemented some simple changes that make things better! - everyone, let's all do this thing! - there! We've tried! It doesn't work - but you've bastardized the original idea beyond recognition - doesn't work! [0] https://ron…

    Comment linking /xprog/articles/jatbaseball/

    on “Hospital checklists are meant to save lives, so why do they often fail?”
  30. todsacerdoti · 2025-03-09

    Submitted Design Thinking as a story · 3 points

    HN discussion

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