Roland Eschenburg

5h layover in Bogota on the way to Peru. My brain says 10am, but the airport shops say it’s 4am.. curses.

🤔

hot take: if you have a 'quality process', you have a problem. Because you're treating quality as a separate thing to your software development process.

Register here: citconf.com/london2025/#...

I'm delighted to host my favourite conference - CITCON - on the 26th and 27th of September 2025 at work (IDBS) near London (Woking). It's free, it's open space and, based on past events, an all round delightful experience. Lots of people buzzing about continues improvement (and integration).

“He’s not involved in the global child trafficking ring. The lady in charge of the global child trafficking ring said so, and why would she lie about the guy who pardoned her for her role in the global child trafficking ring?”

I did not study to become a software engineer because I was crap at math during A levels. Yet, here I am, leading software engineering teams. Because software engineering is a lot about people and empathy for engineers and customers and only a little bit about math and code.

Holidays 🥰

And in keeping with the example, this is where you need an IDE plugin that just hard resets your code (not your tests) to the last time your tests passed. That'll learn 'em

I think the answer is 'toxic leadership'. It's a red flag and those companies should be avoided at all cost. They are looking for people they can pay for 40h/week but who are willing and able to work 80h.

My workphone being waterproof and the kid's pool in the garden being at a nice temperature are two totally unrelated facts.

Feature branching is a lie we tell ourselves.

It feels safer and more controlled, but in reality, it’s slowing you down, increasing risk, and making your integration problems someone else’s future nightmare.

Absolutely thrilled to be hosting #CITCONeurope25 at work this year. 26th/27th of September in Woking. Attendance is free.
An OpenSpace conference about continues improvement in technology. #CITCON

citconf.com/london2025/

Similar argument about TDD being 'slower' than exploratory coding. Yeah, sure, if you're looking at a half hour timeframe, TDD is technically slower. If your measure of 'speed' is the volume of non-test code you've managed to write in that time. This is why I send my devs to touch-typing training 🙄

If you're charging premium prices for your product but offer AI Customer Support, I'm cancelling my order. 🖕

I was going to ask how one goes about doing that, but ChatGPT has some good ideas how to go about forming a professional body as you describe. Are you thinking UK or globally?

looks amazing! enjoy the time off :)

Software that hasn't shipped is inventory. Inventory costs $$$

Looking forward to this episode for the way home today!

Don't get me wrong - the way they mimic human language is most impressive and there are useful ways of using them - like as a research assistant to sift through big volumes of data (if you can control for the lies). What they can't do is abstract reasoning - so nothing new is going to come from them

I don't know why any of this is surprising or 'news' to so many people. Like the recent apple paper. Anybody who looked only briefly into how LLMs work under the hood when they became a thing would have always known that they cannot reason. They've always just been very convincing auto-complete.

Personal development and growth starts with accepting that there are things we don't know yet and that we can learn them from others.

I can't find the original quote, but a very senior developer at a very large company was asked how he got there as quickly as he did.
"I read about one book a year. Which is, on average, one book more than most other people".
This is why I run a book club at work.

Look.. when you put lightning in a rock to teach it to think, even with the best teachers in the world, the rock is still just a rock… or something. I probably oversimplify.

I've been asked 'why invest in CodeCraft?' (and the excellent @jasongorman.bsky.social ) - So I'm going to quote @davefarley77.bsky.social
"The route to speed is high quality software, the route to high quality software is speed of feedback and the route to both is great engineering."

omg. I just had some great news and I can't even share it yet. #CITCON

If your tests only tell you when something breaks, you’re missing the point.

Great tests accelerate learning, guide design, expose bad assumptions, and make change SAFE.

Testing isn’t cleanup. It’s engineering. Shipping without fast feedback? That’s not speed. That’s risk.

Exciting day ahead with CodeCraft training starting at work. 🎉Just a shame I can't do it myself 😩

"I guide others to a treasure I cannot possess.."

Quietly watching our principal SE candidate pair programm Advent of Code puzzles with one of our senior engineers.

In yesterday’s interview the candidate explained how they do TDD to me. Not sure if I should feel sorry for them working like that every day.. or they vaguely heard about TDD at some point in the past and were trying to explaining what they thought it was 🤷‍♂️