Hell Is Other Architects

 One of the thornier facets of being a "design authority" is that you are invariably called upon to make a professional assessment of other peoples' designs. (In a process, often compared to pulling fingernails, known as a "design review").

A team of developers might get a little precious about someone like me asking awkward questions about the design of their code, but that's a walk in the park compared to reviewing code that's been architected (by an architect, no less…)

Some architects will defend their design decisions to the death, and quite often will use every intellectual and political weapon in their arsenal to repel hostile agressors like myself - godless heathens who have the nerve to saunter nonchalontly into their empires and say things like "should the data access code be in the same classes as the business logic?" and "shouldn't that class that everything else depends on be a bit more abstract?" and other grievous blasphemies.

You know what, though? NDepend is always telling me that my designs could be better. Not a lot better, obviously, because I'm brilliant - indeed, I am literally the world's greatest ever software developer, as I proved recently.

And if I guarded myself and my code against that kind of feedback, I wouldn't learn as quickly and my designs wouldn't evolve to the dizzyingly high standards of quality that I invariably achieve. (Just ask my Mum, she'll tell you.)

Repeat after me: feedback is good.