Category: programming

Written by microtodd

Good Intentions Are Not Enough

Looking back through my blog posts, you’ll see that I talk a lot about good developers being less about the ability to write super-awesome-amazing code and more about the attention to detail and quality. https://nuggets-knowledge.com/2021/04/25/dont-let-the-little-things-accumulate/ https://nuggets-knowledge.com/2021/02/20/building-the-habits-that-lead-to-quality/ https://nuggets-knowledge.com/2020/08/08/motivation-vs-discipline-or-i-only-want-to-do-the-fun-stuff/ The thing about this is, I figured this was more or less the known industry standard. I assumed […]

Written by microtodd

Reusability in Coding, What Does It Mean?

I remember when I was first learning the art and science of software engineering, a really big part of almost all of the techniques was around “reusability”. I suppose even then schedule overruns were fairly common (and given that Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month was published in 1975, I suspect I’m right), and it was assumed […]

Written by microtodd

My New Favorite Skill: “Dealing With Ambiguity”

I heard about a concept this week that I like, which is the phrase, “Dealing With Ambiguity”. Now, this is a pretty straightforward phrase, but the context in which I heard was very interesting. It was the idea of this being a very specific skill that can be practiced and trained. In the area of […]

Written by microtodd

Career Advice, or “I want to be a programmer!”

I am occasionally asked for career advice by people wanting to get into the industry, for example, high-schoolers deciding on career choices. One situation that frequently comes up in this situation is people who love programming and want to get a job being a programmer. They ask, “How can I get a job as a […]

Written by microtodd

Coding to the Requirements

Do you know what I love about software developers? They’ll just code to what the requirements or user stories are. I have a little joke to myself, that with the dramatic industry shift to everything-as-code (i.e. infrastructure-as-code, software-defined networking, etc), that pretty much all jobs will eventually one day be “software developer”. Take network design […]

Written by microtodd

Do Your Job Better – With Software!

An old mentor of mine told me something interesting one time.  He was the manager of a team that developed software to simulate the flight of airplanes.  He said to me, “I’d rather hire an aerospace engineer and teach them to write code, than hire a computer scientist and try to teach them aerospace engineering.” […]