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Be proud of your legacy code. Extract concerns. Make exceptions from DRY. David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote at RailsConf Europe 2008 was titled “Living with legacy software”, and centered around the notion of how to deal with your own old code. The articles summarizes the talk.

© 2008 James Duncan Davidson

Rails has been around for 5 years now, and that’s an eternity in software, David said. People who are moving to Rails, see the platform as a salvation for their legacy applications, and as an excuse not to have to think anymore. That’s wrong, David pointed out with a big read slide.

People use the term legacy as though it is a well-defined attribute of code base, but it is really an personal opinion. “PHP is legacy! Java is legacy! - well, that one may be right”, David said jokingly, but really legacy is about your own evolvement of your taste, your knowledge and your personal preferences. Most people who wrote legacy code, thought the code was great when they wrote it. Later people’s perspective change, and even though the code hasn’t changed, it is suddenly considered legacy.

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I haven’t blogged much over the summer, but I have a fair number of excuses:

1. Vacation
2. When I have had the time to write, I have tried to prioritize my now almost finished master’s thesis
3. I got a lot of fun computer games and interesting books for my birthday
4. When I have had the time to write, but haven’t felt like writing on the thesis, I have felt I should prioritize the Summer Reboot documentation project for Radiant

Excuses aside, I think my latest contribution the the Radiant documentation base turned out quite good. It describes how to create a custom page type in Radiant in an extension, adding page tags, custom fields and other good stuff.

Check it out in the Radiant wiki.

(I’m headed for RailsConf Europe in the beginning of September, and I hope a lot of articles will come out of that as usual - hope to see you there!)

On June 24th Mary Poppendieck gave a free talk at the IT University in Copenhagen arranged by BestBrains. The title of the talk was “Is Agile a Fad?” with the subtitle “Will Agile Software Development End Up On the Dumping Grounds of History?”. This dramatically titled talk gathered more than a 100 agile enthusiasts in a packed auditorium, and I spotted several members from Danish Agile User Group and Copenhagen Ruby Brigade, as well as both students and teachers from Copenhagen Business School and, of course, ITU.

Mary Poppendieck started her talk with a story about the dot-com bubble of the 1800’s: Plank roads. She ended the story by asking: Is agile development a plank road? Is agile development just another fad that gets everyone exited for a time, but doesn’t really solve anything in the long run? Poppendieck never really answered this question, but she went on to go through software development from the 1960’s up to our century, concluding that for each decade and each new software development paradigm, large software projects (over a year) was still late, over budget and full of bugs - even today this is the case. She did, however, point out that the opportunity to do small software projects (around 3 months) has increased greatly during these decades, and that large projects is falling out of favor.

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