A list of opinions on our field. It's personal and biased of course, so make that you want out of it. I agree with most I'd say. A couple are rather niche though.

This is a good list of skills and behaviour to develop if you want to get better at our craft.

Or why analogies with physical work don't work...

Nice post. Explains well why the answer is not a number to target. You want to impact the distribution.

Makes sense, the "boyscout rule" has a psychology impact as well.

Very interesting discussion weighting the main differences and disagreements between a Philosophy of Software Design, and Clean Code. I read and own both books and those differences were crystal clear, it's nice to see the authors debate them. I'm a bit disappointed at the section about TDD though, I think it could have been a bit more conclusive. It gives me food for thought about my TDD teaching though and confirms some of the messages I'm trying to push to reduce confusion.

A very precious document. Shows great organization in the work of Knuth of course but the self-reflection has profound lessons pertaining to estimates, type of errors we make, etc.

This is a good point. Idiosyncrasies are not necessarily a bad thing for naming things. Natural languages are fickle friends, you might need to rely to specific metaphors in order to disambiguate.

If you're just doing the minimum to deal with a task to "mark it done" you're probably not doing enough and missing out on learning opportunities.

Interesting musing on the heuristics we use when solving problems. There are good advices in there to make progress and become a better developer.

Another excellent piece from Kent Beck, he's right that the real differentiator in our profession is about digging deep on topics, seeing them through even if that's on the side. Curiosity is a key trait.

Indeed, those are fundamental traits to make sure you learn and make progress on your journey.

I very much agree with this. The relationship between developers and their frameworks is rarely healthy. I think the author misses an important advice though: read the code of your frameworks. When stuck invest sometime stepping into the frameworks with the debugger. Developers too often treat those as a black box.

Another good set of advices. They're not all technical which is to be expected.

Good set of advices on naming variables, types, etc. Indeed this makes things easier to find in code bases.

Interesting musing about the "software crisis" which was declared in the late 60s. We're coping with it by piling levels of abstractions but clearly we're still not out of it. Our craft still needs to grow.

Good food for thought. Explains quite well the factors which impact software development.

Interesting take about the mantras often used in our profession. They shouldn't be treated as laws, but as proverbs carrying a piece of contextual wisdom. It's thus unsurprising that they tend to contradict each other. This contradiction should make us pause and think.

Hopefully nobody is handling configuration by assuming the user will modify the source code or build scripts by hand. Unfortunately I still encounter it from time to time...

Another example of enforcing conventions using automated checks. This time using Python and Django tricks.