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The same goes for code you don’t have to maintain.

#DISTILL WEB MONITOR BUGGY SOFTWARE#

Most software engineers are always going to err on the side of writing code, especially when a non-technical solution isn’t obvious.

#DISTILL WEB MONITOR BUGGY HOW TO#

The best code is no code, or code you don’t have to maintainĪll I have to say is “coders gonna code.” You ask someone in any profession how to solve a problem, and they are going to err on the side of what they are good at. Keeping the user’s needs in mind is really the heart of good user experience. They might not think about it in those terms, but whether it is an external API, programmatic API, user interface, protocol, or any other interface great engineers consider who will be using it, why it will be used, how it will be used, and what is important to those users. Great software engineers think deeply about the user experience of their code. The best software engineers think like designers Because how do you really calculate the cost of building the wrong software? It amounts to a lot more than just lost engineering time.

Investing in this design process, whether through dedicated UX team members or by simply educating yourself, will deliver enormous dividends. Designing software is mostly a listening activity, and we often have to be part software engineer, part psychic, and part anthropologist. You can design the most technically impressive thing in the world, and then have nobody want to use it. Instead it highlights the complexity and irrationality of the environments in which we have to work, which compounds our challenges. I know this is cliche at this point, but the reason most software engineers don’t believe it is because they think it devalues their work. The hardest part of software is building the right thing The sooner you realize this, the sooner you can start to shed your imposter syndrome and instead delight in learning from and teaching others. This means that you can spend decades in your career, and still have a huge knowledge gap compared to someone who has also spent decades in a seemingly similar role. The reason many of us love software is because we are lifelong learners, and in software no matter which direction you look, there are wide vistas of knowledge going off in every direction and expanding by the day. “How can you not know what BGP is?” “You’ve never heard of Rust?” Most of us have heard these kinds of statements, probably too often. My experiences over the last 20 years have shaped how I view software, and have led me to some beliefs which I’ve tried to whittle down to a manageable list that I hope you find valuable.

values engineer productivity over most other considerations.

is starting new projects all the time, but also has to maintain a number of systems.

values working software over specific tools.has almost always been on small, lean teams where we have to do a lot with very little.10 years ago we worked with mostly small/medium businesses, and now we work with a mix of big and small businesses. Then I started Simple Thread and we grew from a team of 2 to a team of 25. So to give you a little context on where my advice comes from, I spent the first half of my career as a software engineer working for various small businesses and startups, then I went into consulting and worked in a number of really large businesses. We may be the culmination of our experiences, but we view them through the lens of the present. If those folks had followed their own advice early on, they themselves would likely have suffered from it. Without understanding the context, the advice is meaningless, or even worse, harmful. “You need to build everything as microservices!” says the company who built a quick monolith, gained thousands of customers, and then pivoted into microservices as they started running into scaling issues. “You just need to charge more!” says the company who has been in business for 20 years and spent years charging “too little” to gain customers and become successful. Almost all advice is contextual, yet it is rarely delivered with any context. Learning from those who came before us is instrumental to success, but we often forget an important caveat. You’re about to read a blog post with a lot of advice.

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