Lessons after five years of professional programming

I disagree. RDBMS are highly optimized for this kind of operations (including MS SQL in here as well) and you’d better off retrieve in the application layer only what you actually need to work on. Think about paging: why would you want to retrieve millions of records in the application layer when you just need a few hundreds to work on? You’re going to waste SELECT time, connection time, application layer processing time (as I believe you’re logic won’t be as optimized as the one that resides in a well optimized RDBMS)

2. Concurrency, avoid it if you can. If not, then remember that with great power comes great responsibility Avoid working directly with threads if you can. Work at a higher level of abstraction if possible. In iOS, for example: GCD, dispatch and operation queues are your friends. The human mind was not designed to reason about infinite temporal state—I get nauseous thinking about how I learned all this first hand.

Queue patterns are cool, but concurrency sometime gives you a great deal of performance improvement. Sure, it’s dangerous, fragile and can mess things up real quick. But I wouldn’t just exclude it because of this. From great developers _is expected_ great responsibility.

3. Minimize state as much as possible, and keep it as localized as possible. The functionalists were/are onto something.

Good point, without exaggeration.

4. Short composable methods are your friend.

Agree, as long as you don’t end up in a compulsing-composive behavior where you abstract and split every method into meaningless individual parts. I’ve seen pojects containing 50 folders, each of them with one file and one method, from people trying to follow this pattern.

5. Comments are dangerous since they can get out of date and mislead, but so is not having them. Don’t comment the trivial, but strategically write paragraphs if needed in specific sections. Your memory will fail you, as soon as tomorrow morning, even after coffee

Code should be self readable, and if you get to the point where it isn’t, then you may have to rewrite few bits. This is not always possible though, especially for temporary hotfixes or hacks. In this case, comments are a must.

6. If you feel one use-case scenario will “probably be ok”, that’s the one that’s going to lead to catastrophic failure a month in production. Trust your paranoid gut, test and verify.

I tend to be more concerned about the scenario you feel 100% confident about. In case of major failures, you’re going to be looking at the dubious parts of your system (scenarios, code, patterns) – making it more difficult to spot the issue, if it’s hidden inside a “safe” part.

7. When in doubt, over communicate all concerns with your team.

Communicate and discuss all concerns as well as proposed solutions.

8. Do the right thing—you usually know what that thing is.

Couldn’t agree more. This is very difficult to explain, but you may find yourself sometime writing code and you know that the right thing takes few hours more and requires more effort… don’t keep doing what you are doing just because “maybe you won’t need it”. Always go for the right thing. If you don’t, it is likely going to bit you back.

9. Your users aren’t stupid, they just don’t have the patience for your cut corners.

Or simply they don’t get your UX. User testing is key to success.

10. If an engineer is not tasked with the long term maintenance of the systems they build, view them with suspicion. 80% of the blood, sweat, and tears of software occurs after its been released—that’s when you become a world weary, but wiser “professional.”

I would expect every engineer in my team to write self readable, well planned, “long term” code. Even if it is for the stupidest internal tool that nobody else is ever going to upgrade. And most of the times this does not slow down development (short and long term). It just becomes automatic.

11. Checklists are your friends.

Kanban boards, checklists, basecamp, whatever helps your team to track stuff and get things done.

12. Take initiative to purposeful enjoy your work, sometimes this will take effort.

True, although sometime you have to do the boring parts as well – you’ll have to do things who sucks, to make sure your customers won’t.

13. Silent failures, I still have nightmares. Monitor, log, alert. But be wary of false positives and the inevitable desensitization it leads to. Keep your system senses clear and alert.

Spot on. Don’t end up with a notification system that sends you thousands of exceptions to your mailbox everyday. You’ll start to ignore them and it’ll be difficult to find out real issues. Keep your monitoring clean. Fix issues, or deprioritize them.

14. At the end of the day, we’re paid to manage complexity. Work accordingly.

…and make complexity simpler for our users.