May 8th, 2009 § 2
I see many people freak out at the mention of any change. I often do that too. Why? Because it forces me out of my comfortable existing neural wiring. Now I try to view change as a contextual adjustments and a little bit of re-wiring for comfort sake.
Hmmm, as I age, I think the slight contextual shifts that I go through now feels less like the massive catastrophic continental shifts. Much nicer.
May 7th, 2009 § 1
The unfortunate human characteristic in all of us is that we like rules when we’re in a new and unfamiliar situation, and hate them the moment we think we are experts. The problem is that rules are great for creating concrete things. If you want to build this then: do a, then b, if you have a c then do d otherwise do e. But it does not work with creating abstract things. And software development is all about building abstractions.
In the past few weeks, I’ve had a few instances where I realized that some people were, basically, asking me for DDD rules – steps for building an aggregate, when and how to use the specification pattern, etc. There are no rules for the noobs for these things. But I think I can constrain the environment so that the noobs can focus a bit more intimately with these aggregates and specifications. One rule I put down was “When working with the following … don’t work outside of this Java package”
Essentially, my proposition is that rules for noobs should constrain the learning environment, not the subject being studied.