Developers Should Have Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

Be ready to change your mind

Ben "The Hosk" Hosking
5 min readJul 7, 2023
Photo by Zach Reiner on Unsplash

In actual practice a man has to guard against many things, and most of all against himself — that is, against human nature. Jessie Livermore

To be a good developer, you need to be good at making mistakes. This sounds dumb because it would be better to avoid making mistakes. Software development is a creative process, no one knows exactly how the software should work.

Developers cannot avoid making mistakes. Making mistakes is part of the development process.

This doesn’t mean you purposely make mistakes, developers don’t need to try to make the wrong software, software projects will conspire to do this for them.

Developers need to be good at changing their minds and not being to rigid with their ideas. Often a design isn’t wrong but the environment has changed and more requirements have been uncovered.

When the technical environment changes, requirements change and designs change, then code needs to change with it.

Embrace mistakes

“I like people admitting they were complete stupid horses’ asses. I…

--

--

Ben "The Hosk" Hosking

Technology philosopher | Software dev → Solution architect | Avid reader | Life long learner