Engineering “Smell”

In software development, a phrase that gets used frequently is "code smell" - referring to an "odor" that code has or develops due to poor initial design or inattention to refactoring during continued development or maintenance.  Hallmarks of "code smell" include things like copying and pasting blocks of code instead of refactoring into callable functions, …

Always Be Clarifying What Success Looks Like

By the end of the project, we had done more than we probably needed to. Honestly, _far_ more than we needed to. The requirement had come down to build "Service X", and the team rallied and pulled it off. But, in hindsight, I think we might have been able to deliver sooner - if I …