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Month: November 2017

A love letter to my IDE

I am not a poet nor am I prone to making public displays of affection but I can’t help myself. I love you so much.

In the beginning

I’ve always had some kind of tool to help me write code. I’m almost embarrassed to say that I started my life as a programmer with a syntax highlighting text editor and an FTP program. I’d write my code, save it, FTP it to the server, and then run it to see if it “worked”. I know that sounds crazy now but it was the turn of the century and I was young and didn’t know any better.

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With great power comes great responsibility

I recently got into a discussion in the comments section of someone else’s blog where I argued that many software developers are overly confident in their abilities. I further argued that this overconfidence leads to the kind of behavior that would be considered professional malpractice if a lawyer, doctor, or professional engineer did something similar in their respective field.

A fellow software developer expressed an opposing view. He made the following points:

  • only a small percentage of software can cause as much damage as medical or legal malpractice and that software is highly regulated
  • if we stop people from pursuing their interests it will stifle innovation, which he was very much against

I hear variations on this view quite often and I think it is worth exploring.

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Worthless software: risks and prevention

We (software developers) write astounding amounts of worthless software. I find it hard to fathom just how much junk we are producing. As someone who spends a fair bit deal of time thinking and writing about how to be a 10x programmer and effectiveness, I believe we have lots of room for improvement here. In this post, I’m going to examine the problem of worthless software and what you can do about it.

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How to make time to repay your technical debt

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about how to pay down your technical debt and most of them miss step one. They don’t tell you how to make the time to repay your technical debt. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to convince management to let you stop working on features and bug fixes to repay your technical debt for long enough to truly make a difference. And since it’s always hard to quantify the impact of repaying technical debt, it rarely gets to the top of anyone’s backlog. Well, I’m going show you how to get around this problem.

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