If people tell you you’re being an asshole, the first thing you need to do is ask yourself “Am I being an asshole?” If you’re so certain of yourself that you don’t even ask yourself that question, well… you’re being an asshole.

The endless calls for “10x”, “rockstar”, “ninja”, “wizard” programmers irritate many of us in the profession, mostly those of us who would never call ourselves such a thing. And we get laughed at, as sour-grapes B-listers who just don’t have the chops to be in such exalted company. But no. We don’t like the 10x rockstar ninja programmers, because we’ve worked with them, and know what they are. They’re vampires. Read more

I’ve released Hotel Concellation for free on Bandcamp. It’s my theme song for the Concellation 2020 group on Facebook, created as a home for those of us affected by the COVID-related cancellation of all our favorite science fiction conventions.

It says a great deal about our society that, typically, people think they are smarter than they actually are, and also think they are less physically attractive than they actually are.

Conway’s Law is well known in the software industry. Here it is, in Mel Conway’s own words: Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure. But in its original formulation, Conway’s Law is only talking about the creation of software. Software, at least successful software, lasts for years, often a decade or even longer. Long enough for the “organization that designs a system” to disappear, replaced by a new organization responsible for maintaining the system. Read more

Good fences make good neighbors. -proverb It is always fashionable to talk about getting rid of the silos in software development. Silos are inefficient! They’re frustrating! Everyone hates silos. But what is a silo, anyway? Why do they come into being everywhere, when everyone hates them so much? And how do we deal with them?  Read more

If you’re using any sort of legacy version control, whether commercial or open source, you should switch to git. If you’re not using version control, you should definitely switch to git. Read more