If you do get a bug report...

"If you do get a bug report, it's a sign you need refactoring, because the code was not clear enough for you to see there was a bug"

-- Martin Fowler in Refactoring

Teenager programmer

...programmers eventually have to go through a stupid-teenager phase. [...] I've been hearing sad but unsurprising news stories about teenagers getting stuck on big rocks, being killed falling off cliffs, or dying of exposure. [...] It's just a bad time for us. Even though teenagers are old enough to understand the warnings, they have this feeling of invincibility that gets them into trouble and often mortal peril.

The programming equivalent happens around us all the time too. Junior programmers with five to ten years of experience under their belts attempt to build giant systems and eventually find themselves stuck on the cliff waiting for a helicopter bailout, telling themselves "my next system rewrite will be better!" Or they fall off the cliff – i.e., the project gets canceled, people get laid off, maybe the company goes under.

That being said [...] you should keep in mind that "5 to 10 years of experience" on a resume does not translate to "experienced"; it means "crazy invincible-feeling teenager with a 50/50 shot at writing a pile of crap that he or she and his or her team can't handle, and they'll eventually, possibly repeatedly, try to rewrite it all." It's just how things are: programmers can't escape being teenagers at some point.

-- Steve Yegge

Watching television

Our parents and grand­pa­rents spent their “Cognitive Surplus” watching tele­vi­sion. That’s a thing of the past… a his­to­ri­cal acci­dent of the old factory-worker age mee­ting the modern mass-media age. Of course it wouldn’t last fore­ver. We humans as a spe­cies were desig­ned to com­pete, not to sit around on our asses.

-- Hugh Macleod @ http://gapingvoid.com/ep/

The over-extended class

Plus the five little kids, the two star­tup com­pa­nies on the side, etc. Obviously, balance is a dis­tant goal. In the mean­time, I dele­gate, work all the time, hardly sleep, totally ignore poli­tics, sports and pop cul­ture, neglect my family too much and pro­bably don’t do any ofmy jobs as well as I could. But these are exci­ting days, and if ever there was a time to be ove­rex­ten­ded, this is it.

-- Chris Anderson

Life Meaning

"Frankly, it beats the hell out of com­mu­ting every mor­ning to the cor­po­rate glass box in the big city, [...] just so I could make enough money to help me for­get that I have to com­mute every mor­ning to the cor­po­rate glass box in the big city."

-- Hugh Macleod @ http://gapingvoid.com/ep/

Blame

Leaders accept blame

-- @johnprg

We are authors

We are authors. And one thing about authors is that they have readers. Indeed, authors are responsible for communicating well with their readers. The next time you write a line of code, remember you are an author, writing for readers who will judge your effort.

Uncle Bob

Teaching people

Better to teach people and risk they leave, than not and risk they stay.

-- anonymous

Looking for a map

If you're looking for 'how', if you're looking for a map, for a way to industrialize the new era, you've totally missed the point and you will end up disappointed. The nature of the last era was that repetition and management of results increased profits. The nature of this one is the opposite: if someone can tell you precisely what to do, it's too late. Art and novelty and innovation cannot be reliably and successfully industrialized.

-- Seth Godin @ Linchpin (best book ever)

Sucesso na carreira

[...] então "estou fazendo alguma coisa que me motiva a levantar da cama todo dia pra fazer" ou "estou fazendo alguma coisa que todo dia eu não quero sair da cama pra fazer" define sucesso ou insucesso na carreira.

- Sob essa óptica, você é bem sucedido?

Eu nem durmo.

-- Fábio Akita, Grok Podcast n° 26

Unemployed?

If you’re a programmer today and you’re not employed, you’re not looking or you’re not doing the right things:

(A) get involved in open source development

(B) learn a development environment that’s hot right now.

-- @dhh in Episode #26 of the 37signals Podcast

The best line of code, ever

"The way you get programmer productivity is not by increasing the lines of code per programmer per day. That doesn’t work. The way you get programmer productivity is by eliminating lines of code you have to write.

The line of code that’s the fastest to write, that never breaks, that doesn’t need maintenance, is the line you never had to write."

-- Steve Jobs

Embrace the constraints

Every project worth doing comes with constraints. Our natural inclination is to fight them.

...

There's a useful alternative: embrace the constraints you've been given. Use them as assets, as an opportunity to be the one who solved the problem. Once you can thrive in a world filled with constraints, it's ever easier to do well when those constraints are loosened.

-- Seth Godin

Choose the simpler design

If a programmer sees a one-minute ugly way to get a test working and a ten-minute way to get it working with a simpler design, the correct choice is to spend the ten minutes. Fortunately, you can make even radical changes to the design of a system in small, low risk steps.

-- Kent Beck