Habits of Expert Software Designers

Habits of Expert Software Designers
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

"Illuminating the bold ideas and voices that make up the MIT Press's expansive catalog. We publish thought-provoking excerpts, interviews, and original essays written for a general reader but backed by academic rigor."

I'd say elegant abstractions are discovered. Those that are designed tend to have leaky corners. Some manage to rediscover something, implement it poorly, and give it a new name to confuse programmers for the next couple of decades that follow.

Experts simulate continually and fool themselves into believing they've thought of everything. Humans are able to predict the outcomes of complicated systems through heuristics. However we're especially bad at specifying invariants of complicated behaviors when it involves live-ness and safety.

Experts know when to model a system and use automation to check their designs. If that is overkill they write property tests. At the very least we write a tonne of unit and integration tests.

There's nothing like writing out the math and having the solution pop out at you.

Experts think about what they are not designing and they write it down as an invariant of their model.

This seems like a blog-vert for a book and while I love learning about how other engineers practice their craft this looks like it's going to be a mixed bag. It might help listing some of the experts involved in this project. Similar to how Coders at Work did.