The Programmer's Paradox

In the early days of the Web, people struggled to make websites more dynamic.

For a long time, the software industry turned against sophisticated power techniques like abstraction.

With complex work, the order in which you do it hugely affects the quality, speed, and accuracy.

The loose definition of yak shaving is that, on your way to completing the main thing, you recurse down so far, removing other little blockers, that ultimately you end up shaving a yak.

In the mid-eighties, I was very excited about the potential of computers.

One of the pitfalls in software design is for people to only concentrate on the narrow case where everything works as desired, but ignore all of the other cases where it has gone partially or totally wrong.

While each line of code is pretty simple, and a few of them are not much worse, assembling big collections of code that behaves as expected is crazy difficult.

Code is a set of instructions for a computer to follow.

My very first experiences with different methodologies for software development date back to the early nineties.

Being able to predict what’s coming up in the future allows you to make better decisions right now.

A long time ago, I remember someone trying to convince me that sufficient testing would prevent ‘all’ bugs.

If you collect some data with respect to a specific context, when there are significant changes in that context, the original data no longer fits seamlessly with any newly collected data.

Decades ago, our project had a convention where we never directly used ANSI C primitive types, unless it was trivial in a loop.

Back in the eighties, when I was a student, there were only two choices: you used ‘vi’ or you used ‘emacs’.

The most common mistake I have seen in big ugly balls of mud is to try to capture data without enough structure.

I use the term ‘software system’ loosely.

A classic expression describes shoving a square peg into a round hole.

If you start from the premise that a system is just a series of access points into a vast array of computations, then if you accept that there will always be a huge number of changes to this underlying code, you see why this is messy.

Recently, my blog has been getting a lot more views.

Programmers hate adding security to their systems.

It really feels like the world has sunk to its lowest point in my lifetime.

On the face of it, shortcuts and makework may seem like they are opposites.

A common misconception in software development comes from not understanding users.

I remember when I was in school; we got a difficult programming assignment that I struggled with.

For any given software development, there are a bunch of ‘bars’ that you have to jump over, which relate to quality.

A software system is a finite resource.

Since I started programming decades ago, there has been one seriously annoying trend that just does not seem to want to go away.