Ralf Westphal (118)

I'm working as a trainer and consultant in the software business. My focus is on sustainable software development, high long-term productivity, and making teams fit for a VUCA world. Back in 2009 I co-founded a large German Clean Code initiative https://clean-code-developer.de. Since 1997 I've written extensively about software development in magazines, books and primarily in my blogs. In addition I'm a speaker at developer conferences in Germany, Europe and abroad.

Against pseudo-wisdom

Apart from esoteric or „spiritual“ circles it seems a trait of software development to use „pearls of wisdom“ to impart one’s professionalism. „Appeal to authority“ likewise is in broad use. It was this tweet which made that clear to me once more: And I’m sick…

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Functional Dependencies Considered Harmful

You’ve probably heard of the seminal paper „Go To Statement Considered Harmful“ by Edsger Dijkstra from 1968. It paved the way for broad adoption of then modern programming languages with their control flow statements like if-then, for, or while. With Pascal and C probably being…

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Revolutions Over Velocity

You probably have ridden a bike a couple of times. And you probably have used one with a couple of gears. So I think you are in a good position to reflect on the notion of velocity as still promoted by quite a few Scrum…

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Event Sourcing for Constructivist Software

What’s Event Sourcing (ES) for? Why deviate from the all encompassing cosy domain data models for keeping and storing application state? Why jump through all the hoops of ES and risk overengineered code? The other day I read an article about Event Sourcing by Tobias…

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Eventual Consistency for Mere Mortals

Developers shun it, if they can: Eventual Consistency (EC). Rather they jump through hoops and invest huge efforts and drive technologies through all sorts of contortions to avoid even small areas of EC in their applications. What developers love is Immediate Consistency (IC). That’s what…

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