Meme Catcher

You are what you wear
And you wear the scars.
There are no mirrors
In your house of cards.
Your world is decaying
But you don’t understand…
—The Dark

The critical point to remember about Software Systems as Big Balls
of Mud, is that it is not an anti-pattern. The statement that applying top-down practices to software results in a Big Ball of Mud is an affirmation that

1. We always have a working system
2. We are mostly able to satisfy most requirements
3. We are almost always able to satisfy critical requirements

In addition, the points stated above are our benchmark for adopting any new process and its inherent risks. We can (and will)
ask in all seriousness, is this solution more robust than a big ball of mud? Successful advocacy always seems to require
answering this question.

Slides

Here is a presentation of some of the ideas in BBM. It is basically a bunch of quotations from the papers mentioned here and a few others. I had intended to write a paper around the ideas presented here, but later realized running Selenium regressions required me to write down the same ideas, albeit in a more pragmatic language

See also

The Selfish Class, also by Foot & Yoder

The problem I have with defining “front end development” is that there is no such thing.

Historically there was software called a “home page” or “web site” that was composed entirely of static HTML pages and binary files, connected by hyperlinks. It was then possible to draw a distinction between “real” programmers, who wrote in application languages like C++ and Java, and “web designers” who only wrote HTML.

This distinction was nice, because application languages are compiled, where as HTML is interpreted by the browser. So it was likewise possible to say that “real” programmers wrote in compiled languages, while “web designers” wrote only code that was meant to be interpreted by a browser.

However, since at least 2000, most pages on the Web have been generated in whole or in part by application software. Entire languages have been developed just to generate Web UI. These include Ruby, PHP and many dialects of Java (also called Java frameworks). So it is now perfectly possible to use one of those languages to generate all of the HTML for a Web application, without actually writing any HTML.
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Here is the classic Nielsen article on headlines.

The best practice as he outlines it is to place the most specific information about the page /first/ in the title.
Consider Macys.com. The following is a (hypothetical) nice, useful section title that could potentially be used:

“Fine China - DINING - Dining & Entertaining - Macy*s”

The most specific information comes first, then the name of the subsection, the section, and finally the name of the web site.
This is exactly the opposite of the common approach to titles

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