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programming

Some things learned in 20 Years of Software Development

I’ve now been a software developer for over 20 years. I started out thinking this would be a temporary diversion, but it’s grown to be something I love. I’ve been lucky enough have a wide experience of the industry, from mobile to microservices, and from three-person companies to multi-nationals. So, I decided to compress some of what I’ve learned into some short points:

  1. If a bug isn’t getting fixed this month, then you might as well not track it as you’ll never touch it. (or, to put it more positively – use a zero-bug strategy!)
  2. TDD is never going to take off. Everyone has automated tests, which is great, but I’ve never worked anywhere that used the proper TDD cycle in practise.
  3. Good project management is more important than methodology. Projects are just as messed up under agile as they were under waterfall, but we now have more meetings.
  4. The DRY principle is overrated. Too many people go for this ease of change rather than ease of reading. This is especially problematic in test code, which is mostly write-only.
  5. Focus on the data – I’ve always considered any computer system as a data-store with some code attached, and this works pretty well. If you get the transactions right, everything else will follow.
  6. The best code is simple. If it can’t be followed by junior colleagues, it’s too complicated.
  7. Projects rarely fail for technical reasons. Unless you’re doing something cutting-edge, the failure is due to something within your control. Software development is one of the least important parts of being a developer.
  8. Performance testing is hard.
  9. New technologies get less exciting as you compare them to things you already know. Like, gRPC is just fancy SOAP.

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