“The biggest lesson I got from software engineering is this: Resist the urge to do something before having a plan. Code written recklessly will almost always fail and frustrate you. Grab a pen and paper. Solve the problem. Then you may use the keyboard.” – JK Molina

My daughter, who's had a degree in computer science for 25 years, posted this about ChatGPT on Facebook. It's the best description I've seen.

one of the biggest reasons i see people fail in becoming software engineers: maturity the ability to say no to the things you want to do and yes to the things you need to do

The ideal long term solution often looks different than the feasible tactical solution right now. When people wonder what engineers do all day if they aren't working on visible changes, they are trying to connect the dots from tactical solutions to the more ideal ones.

John Cutler I prefer “cohesion over consistency”. Alignment can drift to consistency which drifts towards everyone “doing it the same”. Cohesion lends itself to asking “does this make sense?” Which is a much better question than “are we aligned” imho 🤷

“A good deal of the corporate planning I have observed is like a ritual rain dance; it has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does." Russell Ackof

debugging

If a google AI escapes its box, will they still be able to randomly cancel it

"What's finally gonna replace React?"

For all the product teams out there: Jira Product Discovery just hit GA! 1000's of teams already using it. Some of the highest customer satisfaction scores we've seen! 3-5x cheaper than competitors. Check it out: atlassian.com/software/jira/…

It is hard to overstate how strong the push for object-oriented programming was. It even bled out into other fields like education (look up "learning objects"). You had to organize your programming projects into hierarchical classes and you would be ridiculed if you did not. Java

Orcas have done more for social justice than the Supreme Court has this year

The most effective software engineers I know always had a tendency to revert to writing "C" style code. Nothing seems to come close in terms of readability / maintainability.

Gonna have a really unpopular opinion, but this "my wife is great" thing feels like dudes talking about us like accessories to their tech influencer cereers.

One of these days we should find a way not to drain the motivation out of people by the time they know what they’re doing.

the thing about boots theory is that we're converging on a phase of capitalism where you kind of can't buy good stuff that lasts even if you can afford it, because there is simply no reason for any company to sell you something once that they could sell you 100 times

Almost every person who reads How to Win Friends and Influence People internalizes only one thing (“repeat the persons name”) and not the most important thing (“become genuinely interested in others”).

Maggie Johnson-Pint 10000000000% time privilege. it always frustrates me how few people understand this.

Smart people often write the worst code because they're more comfortable with complexity and have larger working memory. I've encountered this so many times in my career Don't write ✍️ code for the smart people. Assume the person looking at it cannot fit complexity in their head

ironically someone who foresaw a problem and avoided it lacks the credibility of someone who blindly stumbled into the problem & survived