Change requires belief

I build meaningful software by empathising with design, development and business needs. My interests are test automation, functional programming and full-stack web development using NodeJS and other tools.
Search for a command to run...

I build meaningful software by empathising with design, development and business needs. My interests are test automation, functional programming and full-stack web development using NodeJS and other tools.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment.
Being able to safely refactor code is one of the greatest benefits of writing tests. The goal of refactoring is to improve code design e.g. style, design patterns, performance. Let's take an example from the previous route handler which has already b...

Marginal gains ⚙️ The 2020 Summer Olympic Games were held in Tokyo between 23 July and 8 August. The enduring motto of the Olympics is “Faster, Higher, Stronger”. From 1908 to 2003 the British cycling team won only 1 gold medal at the Olympics. This ...

This is a scenario that took some time to understand. I could see errors in the browser but everything on the server seemed to be configured correctly. The problem was, that when a request was made by the browser, the server handling the request made...

Florida and Minnesota each developed their Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System (SACWIS). In Florida, system development started in 1990 and was estimated to take 8 years and cost $32 million. As Johnson spoke in 2002, Florida had spe...

Why a health route? I want to begin with the end in mind. When our API is deployed in a cloud environment, the automated, cloud deployment will need a way to know that our API has started correctly. That is the purpose of the GET /health route. I hav...

This morning I was listening to a Planet Money podcast about the US Federal Reserve’s battle with inflation in the ’70s. The Federal Reserve chairman, then Paul Volcker, made a series of changes to halt high inflation (over 10%) that should have worked – in theory – but in practice, no one believed that they would - so they didn’t. Why? Because employers, employees and consumers alike maintained their spending and budget habits that fed into the inflationary cycle. Employees demanded pay rises, employers obliged and consumers bought goods sooner rather than later to avoid price increases – more money chasing fewer goods which leads to inflation. It sounds like the London housing market but let’s leave that discussion for another day.
Change is often difficult because it involves breaking old habits, uncovering information and embracing risk. It also needs the basic conviction that another way is possible.
I became a believer in a lean way of working after attending the ThoughtWorks seminars in London and reading about the Toyota Production System by Jeffrey Licker. Agile describes a way of working that emphasises solving problems end-to-end, makes quality a group responsibility and empowers each team member to make decisions on how they work.
Making change happen will face challenges but they are not insurmountable. Training takes time and persistence, pressure can be deflected, and confusion can be illuminated but without the conviction to follow through on our aspirations we crush our hopes prematurely and tempt irrelevance.
Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced
-- James Baldwin