In this column, instead of examining the software industry’s best practices I want to step through the looking glass. I want to examine its worst practices – specifically, those that have been used so often, by so many people, to produce such predictably bad results that they should be labeled “classic mistakes.”
https://stevemcconnell.com/articles/classic-mistakes/
Hacker Laws
Laws, Theories, Principles and Patterns that developers will find useful.
https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws/blob/master/README.md
How I Almost Destroyed a £50 million War Plane and The Normalisation of Deviance
When I line my jet up on the runway I will always check that I have full and free controls, that there are no other aircraft on the final approach that might land on top of me and that the runway ahead is clear. I also check that I have the correct flap selected and that my ejection seat is ‘live’. I make sure that I have the fundamentals of flight secured before I go and attempt it. Then, if I take a bird into the engine and throw a compressor blade on take-off, well, at least I have given myself the best chance of dealing with that eventuality. Ask yourself, ‘What am I doing that is stopping me from being who I want to be?’ Now you can just concentrate on getting back to the fundamentals of ‘You’.
https://www.fastjetperformance.com/blog/how-i-almost-destroyed-a-50-million-war-plane-when-display-flying-goes-wrong-and-the-normalisation-of-deviance
What If Unhappiness Contains The Secret To Happiness?
Paradoxically, aiming at feelings of satisfaction drives you away from joy. Happiness is best approached obliquely. If you want to be happy, you can’t target it directly. Instead, focus on something outside of yourself.
https://medium.com/personal-growth/what-if-controlling-unhappiness-contains-the-secret-to-happiness-acd96242970c
Web Components Will Replace Your Frontend Framework
Remember when document.querySelector first got wide browser support and started to end jQuery’s ubiquity? It finally gave us a way to do natively what jQuery had been providing for years: easy selection of DOM elements. I believe the same is about to happen to frontend frameworks like Angular and React.
These frameworks have enabled us to do what we always wanted but never were able to: creating reusable autonomous frontend components, but at the cost of added complexity, proprietary syntax and increased payloads.
This is about to change.
https://www.dannymoerkerke.com/blog/web-components-will-replace-your-frontend-framework
The Difference Between SQL’s JOIN .. ON Clause and the Where Clause
What’s the difference between putting a predicate in the JOIN .. ON clause and the WHERE clause?
https://blog.jooq.org/2019/04/09/the-difference-between-sqls-join-on-clause-and-the-where-clause/
Busy Person Patterns
This paper presents thirteen patterns that, when used together, we have found helpful to manage our busy lives […]. Recording these patterns in a format that others can both understand and use is the result of an assignment for a course on Patterns […]. Surprisingly, many of these patterns have general applicability to other areas of study. GOOD ENOUGH, for example, draws from Linda Rising’s same-named pattern for software development […]. Others, like JUST START, can be found in various forms in other pattern languages […].
https://hillside.net/plop/2006/Papers/Library/PLoP%20Busy%20Person%20Pattern%20v8.pdf
Laws of the Universe and Teaching
I seem to be always discovering fundamental Laws of the Universe, especially about teaching. I’d like to share some of them with you.
https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2019/03/24/laws-of-the-universe-and-teaching/
The 737Max and Why Software Engineers Might Want to Pay Attention
NOW: As a software developer, operations engineer, or security engineer, does any of that sound familiar? If it does, that’s why you should pay attention to what happens with the case of the 737Max.
https://medium.com/@jpaulreed/the-737max-and-why-software-engineers-should-pay-attention-a041290994bd
How Inuit Parents Teach Kids To Control Their Anger
Markham recommends an approach close to that used by Inuit parents. When the kid misbehaves, she suggests, wait until everyone is calm. Then in a peaceful moment, go over what happened with the child. You can simply tell them the story about what occurred or use two stuffed animals to act it out.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/685533353/a-playful-way-to-teach-kids-to-control-their-anger
John DeHope 