See Obstinate Idiocy for some background.

Here are three warning signs I was able to deduce.

• No Rational Justification
• Ineffective Tool Choice
• Random Whining

To which I can now add two more.

Symptom 4 of Obstinate Idiocy is that all questions are rhetorical and they often come with pre-argued answers …

I got this the other day: "there seems to be a lot of buzz out in the general public regarding software bugs".

Attached to this was an article from The Economist in 2003 plus one from 2010. To me, this doesn't seem to be a "lot" of buzz. But what …

I was told a horror story about a bad database schema migration. Let's call the author of the horror story HPL.

HPL related a tale of woeful conversion problems from a mismanaged schema migration.

While I could feel HPL's pain, the reasons given for their pain were wrong. They didn't …

Read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html.

I was originally focused on "beauty". Clearly, good design is beautiful. Isn't that obvious? Why so many words to explain the obvious?

The post seemed useless. Why write it in the first place? Why share it? Why share it now, 12 years …

Someone told me they weren't yet ready to write "serious code." They needed to spend more time doing something that's not coding.

I'm unclear on what they were doing. It appears they have some barriers that I can't see.

They had sample data. They had a problem statement. They had …

Read this: How 'DevOps' is Killing the Developer

My pull-out quote:

This is why we see so many developers that can't pass FizzBuzz: they never really had to write any code.

I agree: It appears that DevOps may be more symptom than solution.

I have one tiny objection to any …

There's much to learn. The idea of digesting knowledge down to a pithy little proverb is interesting.

https://github.com/AntJanus/programmers-proverbs

http://futurice.com/blog/programmer-proverbs

http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/bumper-sticker-computer-science

Some of it's new to me. Some of it's timeless.

Also, this http://www.bowdoin.edu/~ltoma …

Why? Why are Enterprise Computers so hard to use? What is it about computers that terrifies corporate IT? They're paying lots of money to have me sit around and wait for mysterious approver folks to decide if I can be given permission to install development tools. (Of course, the real …

Somewhere, I have a vague recollection of reading advice from someone (Bill Gates?) that it takes three versions to get things right. The context may have been a justification of the wild success of Windows 3.0.

Or, I could be just making it up.

But one thing I have …

http://pythonsweetness.tumblr.com/post/64740079543/how-to-lose-172-222-a-second-for-45-minutes Here an important lesson.

Code Rot is Real. It Leads to Subtle and Expensive Bugs.

Claiming that code cleanup is just pointless "gold plating" is the kind of thing that can drive a company out of business.