By other programmers — and themselves
When you’re a kid, you’re told many things that you later discover to be absolute lies. The thing is, this process repeats itself: What might be true in your childhood doesn’t apply in college, and many things that may be true in college can be tossed out when you “turn pro.” Even then, there are “things people say,” like “Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice.” When in fact, of course, it does.
Misconceptions about various aspects of the software industry turn out to be pretty difficult to spot and take apart. …
The Two Evils
Think of the perfect way to dive into a project, in order to expand it, integrate with it, or to fix a bug. You probably imagine one of these two scenarios:
- It’s the best code you’ve ever seen, written by a true software guru. The design is so straight forward, the names are so expressive, and the flow is so clear, that you don’t even need comments, let alone a document. Even though the project is pretty big. With no questions asked, you just find the problem, fix it, run it, push, and go home at 17:00. …
Well, sure not always. Fine, this might be a misleading title. However, it might be useful to have the mindset of “always”, so that we always ask the right questions at the right time.
The point is this: These days when we, sometimes experienced engineers, design a system, a feature etc., we’re often so consumed with abiding by all the principles in the book, be it scalability, reuse, configurability and whatnot, that it’s easy to forget that all these amazing things come at a cost. …
Eugene Marin
Software developer, in a relentless search for better ways.
