welcome
Thank you for joining the MEAP for The Feedback-Driven Developer. This is a book about delivering code quickly, but it’s not about coding fast. It’s about maximising the value in what we are delivering, culling the wasted time, and ensuring what we do deliver is working and reliable. If you take on board the principles in this book and make them habitual, even if you are new to this industry, you will be able to deliver more value more quickly than many senior developers.
I believe that a system for continuous feedback is at the core of an effective development process. That’s because we use feedback to understand everything about what we are doing. Is it valuable? We need feedback. Does it still serve its purpose? More feedback. Does the code work? Again feedback. Am I going about it in the right way? Is it worth automating this thing? Feedback, feedback and more feedback. Feedback is at the core of understanding the why and how of what we are building and allows us to make constant course corrections to hone in on valuable software.
To get the most from this book you should already have some basic development skills. That is, you should have progressed at least slightly beyond the tutorial stages and need something that will take you deeper into the heart of real software development skills. Or maybe you are technically more experienced, but still need a helping hand to fine tune your development process for more valuable and better-quality output. The book's examples are in JavaScript (and some TypeScript), but the code is simple, and if you have experience with other languages you won’t have much difficulty understanding it.
Together we’ll build a somewhat complex application, but we’ll build it in a series of simple and understandable steps - just enough for you to see that any complex application is nothing more than simple steps joined together. Because that’s how good software development actually works: incrementally building and evolving something complex through a sequence of small and well-tested iterations with plenty of opportunity in between for feedback.
But it isn’t the software we are building that is the point; that’s just a vehicle for exploring the techniques I’m going to teach you that will make software development more achievable: not exactly easy, but also not as hard as you might think. You just need to internalize the formula for breaking complexity up into simple pieces.
While I was ranking up as a software developer the learning presented in this book was passed from senior to junior through unofficial mentoring: working together to build software, learning from each other during development, and becoming better by constantly observing the working habits of those around us. It’s taken over 28 years for this knowledge to filter through my brain and my work and arrive now in the form you are about to read.
Together we’ll build the habits you need for ongoing success as a software developer.
Please feel free to share your questions and comments in the liveBook Discussion forum.
—Ashley Davis