Knowledge management for software developers

There are 3 different kinds of knowledge that a software developer has to manage on his professional career. I called them principles, technology and industry knowledge. There is other relevant stuff such as soft skills but today I’m focusing on knowledge not skill sets.

Principles

Before continuing I want to clarify what I mean by principles: borrowing the title from uncle bob’s famous book I’m referring to principles, patterns and practices (with a little twist from the book’s meaning).

Principles are technology agnostic. They can be applied generally on a wide set of circumstances. An example would be the DRY principle which is universally recognized as a good practice in software engineering (no matter if you work in an OOP or a functional paradigm).

Patterns are often limited to a specific mindset, a paradigm.

A good example here could be the null object pattern. It makes sense in an OOP context, but it lacks when used in procedural programming.

Patterns are usually a trade of simplicity for flexibility the latter being derived of some of the paradigm traits. You could say that it maximize some of the paradigm benefits at the cost of simplicity: the code may be complex to understand to someone not familiarized with the paradigm but at the same time is easier to change once understood. The secret here lies in one’s ability to use the paradigm thinking process. As with everything else, practice leads to mastery.

You can find a compilation of these patterns in almost every development paradigm, with names that make it easy to refer to them when talking with other developers.

Practices refer to the way we develop code. It includes stuff like refactoring, testing, incremental delivery and so on. They’re usually outlined in a software development methodologies and some are expressed as conventions. While they can be widely applied, we are usually use and learn them in the context of a team or project’s specific configuration.

All of us have a certain a familiarity degree with each of these concepts. However, not all of us are conscious that they are interrelated to each other i.e. comprehension of some principles can help us decide when to apply certain patterns. This kind of knowledge ultimately leads to better code and designs.

Technology

This is probably the kind of knowledge that most developers spend the most time learning. This makes sense: with so many new technologies every other week, we must try to keep up or we’ll be at the risk of becoming obsolete. In a sense technology is like a fashion trend: we have something new this summer, but as soon as autumn arrives a new framework that promises help us code faster takes the lead. Unless someone deliberately chooses to ignore the latest trends, there is just not enough time to become really proficient with a single technology. I usually think of technology as software platforms, libraries and frameworks.

Software platforms are the environments on which the code is executed (.net, nodejs, Java). I like to think about software and not hardware platforms because software platforms are often able to run on different hardware platforms i.e. java can run on a mobile, desktop or server platform.

Software libraries provide a very specific functionality that can be used in multiple projects i.e. JQuery purpose is manipulation of the DOM. They are methodology agnostic which means they’re really flexible when it comes to workflow types. This property makes them easy to be reused and ported between team, jobs and industries.

Frameworks often provide a set of libraries to accomplish something more complex. We even have application frameworks such as Spring, which handles everything from retrieving data to displaying it. Or Angular which provide us with the tools to create a presentation layer and communicate with the backend. One difference between a framework and a library is that a library provides just you with the tools to do things while the framework also enforces a (often highly opinionated) way to do things. This makes it harder to integrates them on an ongoing project (as opposed to a library) but are a great choice if you are starting from the ground up.

Most of the time, software libraries and frameworks are tied to a software platform, so you naturally learn the ones that run on your platform of choice (like Java or nodejs). Sometimes ports of these libraries and frameworks can be made (like hibernate to nHibernate), but most often than not they will make some adjustments to take advantage of the platform particular characteristics (meaning there are changes on the API).

Industry

This is often a byproduct from working on a project. As a software developer you really don’t study accounting unless you are creating an accounting software. Or banking. Even worse, sometimes we just limit ourselves to create what the customer requirements document says, without even trying to understand the purpose of the software or the needs of its users. Eric Evans pointed this out and explains that the reason is because this kind of knowledge is not useful to us unless we intend to keep on the same industry (like manufacturing). In other words, its reusability scope is very limited when compared with the other kinds of knowledge. However as Evans also explains, a deep understanding of the industry it’s necessary if we really want to create not only a good thing but the right thing.

Mix and match

The time you spend on each of these kinds of knowledge leads to a different set of abilities. Try it out!

  1. Evaluate yourself on each of these kinds of knowledge
  2. Select the area you’re lacking the most (principles, Frameworks, you pick)
  3. Make a 3 month plan to improve
  4. Start over 🙂

As always, your comments are welcome!