Posts tagged “engineering”

Good code does what you need it to do and is ready when you need it. Testability, elegance, extensibility matter, but they're secondary. Late code isn't good code. Code that never ships needs no maintenance. Everything else is nuance.

Most technical interviews test the wrong things: memorized syntax, whiteboard coding, brand-name employers. Instead, hire for learning ability, intellectual honesty, clear communication, and basic decency. "Team fit" is bias in disguise. Homogeneity means you're hiring wrong. Good hiring is hard and slow, but worth it.

We build roads by widening paths until we finally bulldoze everything and start fresh. We build software by layering complexity onto demos until we have a mach 1 titanium rocket ship navigating a dirt track. At some point, we need to build a new road.

The ultra-wealthy are literally building a massive palm-shaped island visible from space off Dubai. Just go look at it.

Responding to an MSNBC piece on bad software: unlike engineers who rebuild flawed machines from scratch, coders patch and graft changes onto existing code. All those shortcuts and compromises compound into garbage. Code reuse isn't the answer. That's why software sucks.