Don’t Just Document Software, Tell a Story.

Humans tend to remember stories much better than mere facts, which probably is why storytelling has such a long tradition in human history. Storyteller is - quoting from their own description - an "editor plugin that generates web pages that recreate and animate entire programming sessions" (see this playback repository for examples and the project's GitHub repository for more details). It's an interesting, novel take on software documentation in that instead of merely describing some current state of code and what it's supposed ... Read more

Monoliths Aren’t Inherently Bad

Self-professed minimalist developer Kelsey Hightower a few months ago wrote about monoliths being the future. The microservice design pattern has been trending in software development for quite some now. Unfortunately, more often than not it's been indiscriminately treated as a panacea to every software architecture and design problem out there. Microservices can help with one aspect specifically: Reducing deployment risk. If you have a large monolith and frequently need to make changes to a specific part or feature provided by that monolith the whole ... Read more

The Richardson Maturity Model for REST APIs

On his website about software design patterns Martin Fowler provides an in-depth explanation of the Richardson Maturity Model for HTTP-based REST APIs by Leonard Richardson. According to that model REST APIs come in 4 levels of sophistication: Level 0, aka the "Everything is a POST request" model for example propagated by SOAP. This is basically tantamount to remote procedure invocation. Level 1 - Resources: Every resource is accessed through its own canonical URL. Level 2 - HTTP Verbs: Verbs such as GET, PUT, PATCH and ... Read more

My name is Björn …

Looks like my name's broken. Perhaps next time I'll check in under a non-Unicode, strictly ASCII charset one. Does that count as a @KevlinHenney? — Björn Wilmsmann (@bwilmsmann) October 2, 2019 https://twitter.com/bwilmsmann/status/1179428788708560896 Read more

No-code, Low-code, Some Code and Everything In-between

CTO-for-hire (through Freeman Clarke) Alex Hudson recently wrote an article about what he terms "The 'No Code' Delusion": That so-called no-code and low-code tools will replace bespoke business software development entirely, no trained software developers required anymore. In a nutshell, it's the old pipe dream of just having to write a specification (in this case a visual one) and having the actual code write itself, the fallacy here of course being that the code is the final product rather than the specification ... Read more