#89 - Code That Fits in Your Head - Mark Seemann

Tech Lead Journal

“The goal of software is often to sustain an organization. An organization invests in software in order to achieve some goal and hopefully to sustain itself in helping it achieve that goal."

Mark Seemann is an acclaimed author, international speaker, and a highly experienced developer. In this episode, Mark shared some insights from his latest book, “Code That Fits in Your Head”, on how to write sustainable software and manage software complexity. Mark first started by sharing why he wrote this book and explained why software development is hard. He also pointed out the difference between software engineering and other physical engineering disciplines, especially on the set of constraints. Mark then explained the importance of writing sustainable software and shared the perspective that code is a liability instead of an asset. Towards the end, Mark shared about the Rule of 7 as a guideline to manage code complexity and a few practices we can use to build sustainable software, such as checklist, vertical slice, x-driven development, and command query separation.

Listen out for:

• Career Journey - [00:06:26]
• Code That Fits in Your Head - [00:07:49]
• Software Development is Hard - [00:10:55]
• Software Engineering vs Physical Engineering - [00:15:01]
• Sustainable Software - [00:17:58]
• Code is a Liability - [00:19:55]
• Rule of 7 - [00:22:43]
• Checklist - [00:31:23]
• Vertical Slice - [00:35:52]
• X-Driven Development - [00:39:47]
• Command Query Separation - [00:45:07]
• 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:49:38]

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Mark Seemann’s Bio
Mark Seemann is a bad economist who’s found a second career as a programmer, and he has worked as a web and enterprise developer since the late 1990s. As a young man, Mark wanted to become a rockstar, but unfortunately had neither the talent nor the looks – later, however, he became a Certified Rockstar Developer. He has also written a Jolt Award-winning book about Dependency Injection, given more than a 100 international conference talks, and authored video courses for both Pluralsight and Clean Coders. He has regularly published blog posts since 2006. He lives in Copenhagen with his wife and two children.

Follow Mark:

• Website – https://blog.ploeh.dk
• Twitter – @ploeh
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ploeh

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For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/89.