Developers work better when used well — A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. — Doug Linder Good software developers have a big impact on software development. On every successful software project, there is strong a senior team to lead the other developers. How a software project uses its…

Nice to have requirements are the ultimate distraction — You will never reach your destination if you stop to throw stones at every barking dog Winston Churchill If you stop to add every requirement you can think of, you will never finishing building the software. Until Software is in production and being used, it’s all cost and no benefits. …

Consultants are like Power Points. They are easy to create and subsequently there are lots of them. Most PowerPoints presentations are not very good, like most consultants. The effort and training needed to become a consultant is a lot less than the effort needed to become a developer. The quality of person in any role makes a big difference because most of the work done when creating software is thinking and problem solving.

I'm not sure how much GPT 4 will help. The difficultly isn't in writing the code, the hard part is knowing what to write. How will anyone know exactly what is needed enough to explain it to ChatGPT 4. Creation of code is the quickest and easiest part. The harder part is to create a whole solution built of lots of different code blocks. Understanding it all, to work out how it works and then exactly what you want to change.

Software development wants cowboy developers — There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. C. A. R. Hoare …

When brute force replaces thinking and development skill — There are many projects which are Agile in name but chaos in reality Agile software development is a blunt force approach of keep creating the wrong software and slowly getting it right. Whilst writing developers are problems solvers first, coders second, but most other developers use an alternative approach. Developers…

Development is a game of thinking — “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” Albert Einstein The traditional image of a developer is a code monkey, locked away in a room (remotely now) writing code with their headphones on and fuelled…

Developers either grow or stagnate — “If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.” — Seth Godin What holds back the careers of many developers is themselves. It’s not what developers do that holds, but what they don’t do. Like fruit, developers are ripening or rotting. …

The hidden cost of remote working — Is remote working too good to be true? The benefits seem far greater than costs or are the disadvantages of remote working just harder to see. Are the negatives of remote working hard to see because they are not immediate? I spent the first 15 years of being a developer…