Lessons From a Master

One of the several great things about working for my current client is that their high public profile means it’s reasonably easy to get interesting people to come and visit us from time to time.

Last week the mighty Martin Fowler dropped by to talk to us.

I was lucky enough to spend a few hours in Martin’s company, sharing lunch in the canteen with him and a few other senior technical bods, listening to his talk and Q&A, then as he visited the various teams, taking a look at how we do things.

His talk lasted just over an hour, and was delivered with great panache, especially considering it was entirely off the cuff. Beginning with his experiences in software design right through his career, he described key lessons learned, building up to an inspirational tub-thumping call to arms for the British media (and my client in particular) to continue to battle the ‘information wasteland’ coming out of the American commercial media. Fantastic stuff.

I made several notes during his talk and I thought I’d jot them down here.


A lot of good ideas in software get lost though the generations. Part of the responsibility for this lies with the old-timers who don’t take adequate steps to communicate their ideas and lessons they’ve learned to the younger generation. Martin sees it as his main aim nowadays: to look backward, spot patterns, and try to communicate those through his books and talks.

The best ideas and techniques span multiple languages and technologies. By moving back and forth between the C++ and SmallTalk communities in his early days as a programmer, Martin was able to cross-pollinate ideas between the two, and filter out the most powerful concepts – those which applied to both.

Irreversible decisions are the most dangerous kind for any organisation. Lean (and thence Agile) principles try to make as many decisions as possible reversible, and to defer for as long as possible those which appear not to be. Largely, this is achieved by moving rapidly in small, safe steps so that the path backwards is always clear. Thus a big and risky task becomes smaller and more approachable.

Don’t accept that something can’t be changed – just try to figure out how.

If something is awkward and painful (e.g. database refactoring) then do it as often as possible, until it becomes easy.

Collaboration with the customer is key and to that end, the creation of a ubiquitous language is key. Other tools that can help with this collaboration are UML diagrams (as sketched on a whiteboard), CRC cards and tests.

The most important skill for a software developer is to be able to collaborate with people. The traditional view that mathematical skills are the most important is becoming redundant.

When designing code, two main features make for a good design:

  • Lack of duplication
  • Clear reveal of intent

To enable clarity of intent, naming is extremely important.

When designing a system, one approach is to think of modules as things which keep secrets, then partition your design around the secrets that need to be kept.

Published by Matt

I write software, and love learning how to do it even better.

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