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This is the best-kept secret of the software engineering profession: engineers hate code. Especially code written by other people. It's why they love working on greenfield projects so much. No code, no maintenance, no headaches! Ever wondered why microservices took off in teams of all sizes? A microservice
over a year ago

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More from Dan Cowell

Deadlines Work

If you had told me that I'm capable of cycling 50km non-stop, soaked to the skin in torrential rain, eyes burning with sunblock, sweat and ocean spray, in sub-10°C conditions, I would have called you a filthy liar. Then yesterday happened. It was meant to be

a year ago 100 votes
"balls": The day I locked everyone out of the company intranet.

I was just over a month into my first job in the tech industry - a lowly HTML jockey and frontline support drone at a local web agency. Everything that could have gone wrong this particular morning, had. I'd woken up late, made a mess of my breakfast,

a year ago 36 votes
Breaking the rules: I threw away 10 months of work after 2 months on the job.

When I took over the team, they were in month 8 of a 3-month project to relaunch the company's ecommerce website. After 2 months leading the team, I decided to scrap it and start over. This is the story of how and why, and whether it all worked out.

over a year ago 33 votes

More in programming

Computers Are a Feeling

Exploring diagram.website, I came across The Computer is a Feeling by Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan: the modern internet exerts a tyranny over our imagination. The internet and its commercial power has sculpted the computer-device. It's become the terrain of flat, uniform, common platforms and protocols, not eccentric, local, idiosyncratic ones. Before computers were connected together, they were primarily personal. Once connected, they became primarily social. The purpose of the computer shifted to become social over personal. The triumph of the internet has also impoverished our sense of computers as a tool for private exploration rather than public expression. The pre-network computer has no utility except as a kind of personal notebook, the post-network computer demotes this to a secondary purpose. Smartphones are indisputably the personal computer. And yet, while being so intimately personal, they’re also the largest distribution of behavior-modification devices the world has ever seen. We all willing carry around in our pockets a device whose content is largely designed to modify our behavior and extract our time and money. Making “computer” mean computer-feelings and not computer-devices shifts the boundaries of what is captured by the word. It removes a great many things – smartphones, language models, “social” “media” – from the domain of the computational. It also welcomes a great many things – notebooks, papercraft, diary, kitchen – back into the domain of the computational. I love the feeling of a personal computer, one whose purpose primarily resides in the domain of the individual and secondarily supports the social. It’s part of what I love about the some of the ideas embedded in local-first, which start from the principle of owning and prioritizing what you do on your computer first and foremost, and then secondarily syncing that to other computers for the use of others. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

2 days ago 3 votes
New Edna feature: multiple notes

I started working on Edna several months ago and I’ve implemented lots of functionality. Edna is a note taking application with super powers. I figured I’ll make a series of posts about all the features I’ve added in last few months. The first is multiple notes. By default we start with 3 notes: scratch inbox daily journal Here’s a note switcher (Ctrl + K): From note switcher you can: quickly find a note by partial name open selected note with Enter or mouse click create new note: enter fully unique note name and Enter or Ctrl + Enter if it partially matches existing note. I learned this trick from Notational Velocity delete note with Ctrl + Delete archive notes with icon on the right star / un-star (add to favorites, remove from favorites) by clicking star icon on the left assign quick access shortcut Alt + <n> You can also rename notes: context menu (right click mouse) and This note / Rename Rename current note in command palette (Ctrl + Shift + K) Use context menu This note sub-menu for note-related commands. Note: I use Windows keyboard bindings. For Mac equivalent, visit https://edna.arslexis.io/help#keyboard-shortcuts

2 days ago 3 votes
Thoughts on Motivation and My 40-Year Career

I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption. I’ve been pushing myself to write more lately because my co-authors and I have a whole fucking book to write between now and October. […]

3 days ago 9 votes
Single-Use Disposable Applications

As search gets worse and “working code” gets cheaper, apps get easier to make from scratch than to find.

3 days ago 7 votes