This is a couple of years old, but I really enjoyed this piece on Code-first vs Product-first programmers. It is true that some programmers are more focused on the code itself, its design and elegance, and not on the product they are building and the problem it solves.

This article on this topic is fascinating. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how poor the research is on this topic. I wish there were more recent books by Steve McConnell, as his books on programming always seemed to include references to actual research. Then again, now I’m wondering how good that research was, although I’d still bet on McConnell’s books. I particularly enjoyed Rapid Development and Code Complete, although Software Estimation is also very good. Oh wait, doing a search, I see he wrote a book published in 2019 on agile. Hmmmm….I may have to give it a read.

Honestly, I’m not trying to be negative. Programming is hard. We’re all in this together, I know.

This post by Nick Hodges about Brain Time vs. Butt Time does a nice job of explaining the challenge in measuring developer productivity.

I’m not saying software is easy. In fact, I know I have some bad software too.

Lots of female programmers have suggested that they they don’t feel that the profession is very inclusive. Personally I’ve never had an issue as a woman, but I do run into this a lot:

Every time I see a story involving planes and “software mistake” I get nervous:

I use Azure DevOps for my freelance software development work. It is (relatively) affordable, and combines issue tracking with source control management and continuous integration. Previous issue tracking systems I used did not have these other features, which meant trying to isolate the code that was changed for particular bugs or enhancements was difficult. I like that Azure DevOps provides an integrated solution, but frankly the issue tracking part of it is not that great. Here are some of the things I wish it would do:

As is typical, industry news is filled with contradictions.

I ran into an issue in a SQL stored procedure where I was using ISDATE to test a string before stuffing it into a date column