Cargo Cults and Angry Monkeys If you have never heard the term “Cargo Cult Programming“, it’s an it’s an excellent way to describe blindly following processes without understanding the theory behind them. The term originates from a story about aboriginal islanders during World War II. During the war, cargo planes regularly (and from their perspective,…
Expert Beginner Recap In my last post I introduced the term “Expert Beginner” to describe someone who has capped out in their learning at some sort of local maximum, convinced that the local is global. Expert Beginners are developers who do not understand enough of the big picture to understand that they aren’t actually experts….
Beyond the Dead Sea: When Good Software Groups Go Bad I recently posted what turned out to be a pretty popular post called “How to Keep Your Best Programmers,” in which I described what most skilled programmers tend to want in a job and why they leave if they don’t get it. Today, I’d like…
Many moons ago in my first role as a developer, I had very little real work to do for the first month or so on the job, so I occupied myself with poking around the company intranet, jotting down acronyms, figuring out who was responsible for what, and documenting all of this in spreadsheets and…
So, I’m back from my two weeks overseas, refreshed, enriched, and generally wiser, I suppose. We traveled to Spain and Portugal, visiting a ton of historic sites, eating good food and having fun. For my first post back, I’d like to make a third post in my series on abstractions. Methods as Recipes I was…
