In almost every field, people will grab onto some belief without any (rational) reason. Programmers often act and seem to believe that they are actually rational people and would not hold an irrational belief (at least where our field is concerned). When you look at your fellow developers, you can usually spot counter-examples. Like many… Read More »
What’s the most important thing we get from designing and writing code? It’s a question we don’t ask often enough. Mostly because it’s easy to assume the answer is obvious. Revenue? The business you are working for will often suggest that revenue is the most important thing about code. But, that doesn’t explain why some… Read More »
After seeing how our careful and thoughtful design changes over time, it should be obvious that some designs will not survive implementation or later maintenance. It should also make you wonder how to do a better job on design. Looking Back on your Design In the future, some of your great decisions will look naive.… Read More »
When people look at what they want to call Legacy Code, they don’t see a coherent system. They see an implementation that they can’t read. They see a design that is not simple/elegant enough. They see a pile of patches instead of a clean architecture. They wonder how any competent programmer could have made such… Read More »
One of my managers many years ago was in a meeting where someone from sales was disparaging our legacy code and he made a comment that has stayed with me for decades: “Legacy? Oh you mean the code that pays our paychecks?” The legacy system pays our paychecks Most code that hangs around long enough… Read More »
Most companies with a software development staff have legacy code that they need to maintain because it runs their business. Even companies that don’t do software as their main business may have internal tools and such that they need to maintain. Many software developers and even product and management would prefer to have new, shiny… Read More »
I have heard this comment in almost every company where I have worked. Without fail, this response occurs when someone on the technical staff suggests adding a practice accepted in other parts of the industry. Some variations are Early in my career, it was used to justify not using version control (yeah, I’ve been at… Read More »
Several years ago I gave a talk at work with the same title as this post. For a while, recordings of these lunch talks were available internally in the company. Over several years, I’ve had people either thank me for the original talk or reference things I said in the talk. Despite the fact that… Read More »
People often claim that with Rust code “when it compiles, it works”. Like most programming aphorisms, it is a slight exaggeration. This is not actually a claim that it is impossible to write bugs in Rust. It is not a claim that any program written in Rust is bug free. It is meant as a… Read More »
Efficient Linux at the Command Line Daniel J. Barrett O’Reilly, 2022 I’ve worked in Linux for over 2 decades, read dozens of articles and several books on using Linux, and this book still taught me of things I didn’t know (or remember). Unlike many N cool things you can do with Linux or X things… Read More »