Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
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Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
#2This is a gem:
> When you’re glueing other people’s code together, there’s a very real danger that the glue is where complexity will accumulate. But glue code is the last place where you want your complexity to live. It hides complexity. What you want is to make complexity as visible as you can, shining a light on it with the hope that it turns into dust and disappears.
Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
#3thank you for writing this.
i am programming (and-all-that-goes-with-it = mostly-mentoring, both downwards and upwards) for 35 years... and it is somewhat difficult for me to tell the things you wrote there, to my pupils/students/team/s, because i have kind-of found them loooong time ago, and since then have much further understanding, and now i consider them obvious/intrinsic and don't even think about them... and they are not obvious at all.
And yes, i still love programmming very much (although sometimes it is about programming the people. But not direct, it's more like building a language, to enable further things with it :).
Now, if it's only one thing from me: it's all about people. okay, Mostly about some-people somewhere in the chain. Not about code/architecture/....
have fun
www.svilendobrev.com
Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
#4I agree with this article 100%. Got 14 years in the field and I've come to the same conclusions as well.
Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
#5The point about other people's code rings true for me. What I've been trying to do is gather a collection of good code I've written over the years - solutions that can work for a variety of problems. They're like my own little npm packages, except I have full access to the source and completely understand them inside and out. I can also completely explain how they work to my team, and how they can make changes to the behavior if need be.
Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
#6"Code has mass". Following from that, attention is force and understanding is acceleration.
Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
#7"Code has mass". Following from that, attention is force and understanding is acceleration.
Code has mass has another interesting corollary: large enough collections of code tends to almost gravitationally attract more code. This results in god classes and those huge libraries of diverse functionality that usually go by the name "misc" or "util".
The mechanism for this is fairly obvious: it is usually convenient to put new functionality next to existing one because it allows you to reuse things that maybe should not be reused. The more diverse a big lump of code, the more potential future functionality is convenient to add to the lump.
This is a reason to be very vigilant against this type of accidental reuse and incohesive modules. It's a reinforcing feedback loop that needs a balancing mechanism.
Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
#8> Look at that little program go, holding the internet together, despite the 17 TODOs in it.
This hit a little too close to home.
Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
#9> Fearlessness is undervalued
Being technically fearless is also a trait I've identified in engineers I enjoy working with. It's hard to quantify how you gain this. I think it's a combination of strong fundamentals and deep curiosity. It forms when things stop being magic.
Re: Professional Programming: The First 10 Years
#10> Fearlessness is undervalued Being technically fearless is also a trait I've identified in engineers I enjoy working with. It's hard to quantify how you gain this. I think it's a combination of strong fundamentals and deep curiosity. It forms when things stop being magic.
Absolutely agree, but I like to think the magic bit can stick around as wonder. Perhaps that's bundled into deep curiosity.