principles

Shouldn't You Be Using Python?

SQLite, Hidden Fields, and Stubbornness

Adding Manpower to a Late Software Project Makes It Later

The Job Title That Doesn't Exist for the Job That Matters Most

The Stack of Articles That Organised Themselves Into a Theory of Human-Machine Collaboration

Favor Has-A Over Is-A, Or Else

Any Organization That Designs a System Will Produce a Design Whose Structure Is a Copy of the Organization's Communication Structure

The Point at Which a System's Complexity Becomes Self-Sustaining and Uncontrollable

The Art of Not Trusting the Code You Just Watched Being Written

Passing Arguments to Functions, but Enterprise

The Less You Know, the More You Think You Know

Twenty-Five Seconds of Pressure That Northern Europe Has Been Failing to Replicate Since 1884

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

When a Measure Becomes a Target, It Ceases to Be a Good Measure

The Other Nine Were Never Needed

The Contract Was Never the Contract

The Cognitive Debt That Compounds at Runtime

The Philosophy That Worked Until It Became a Brand

Code That Works, Written by Someone Who Left, in a Style That Is No Longer Fashionable

The simple system that replaces N complex systems requires building all N first.

The Optical Illusion of Collaborative Debugging

The BBQ Principle That Is Also a Software Architecture, or Vice Versa

Minimum Viable Product, Maximum Viable Excuse

The Debt You Wrote Down On Purpose

Anything That Can Go Wrong Will Go Wrong

The Methodology Where The Code Is Too Embarrassed Not To Work

The Methodology Where Specs Yawn and Stories Laugh

The Mathematics of How Badly Things Scale, Practiced Instinctively by People Who Never Learned It

Building the Cathedral When You Needed a Shed

Or, Why the Bicycle Shed Is Always the Wrong Colour

The Holy Trinity of Seasoning, or Why Three Is Enough

Every Employee Rises to Their Level of Incompetence, Then Stays There

Five Rules of Programming That the Industry Has Read, Applauded, Printed on Mugs, and Ignored

Seven Principles of Lean Software Development, or What Happens When Someone Actually Reads Toyota Before Writing a Certification Guide

The Road to Hell Is Paved with Generous Parsers

The Framework Extracted from Zero Working Tools

The Book That Was Agile Before Agile Had a Name, a Manifesto, or a Certification Industry

Changing the Structure Without Changing the Behaviour, and Other Acts of Quiet Heroism

Interesting Approach

The Ideal Companion to HTMX, Because Nobody Else's Opinions Fit Your Application

The Decisions You Can't Undo, Made by People Who Won't Be Here

The Art of Seeing the Whole, Practised by Almost Nobody

Code Written by Someone Who Left

The Sprint That Atones for the Previous Twelve

The Act of Loving a Codebase Enough to Make It Smaller

Zawinski's Law Got A Sequel

The cost of building the complex system you need in order to discover the simple one that replaces it.

A Novel About Throughput That Became the Throughput of Novels

Build-Measure-Learn (Emphasis on Build, Skip Measure, Forget Learn)

The Document That Turns Shortcuts Into Homework

Essays on Software Engineering, and the Fifty Years Nobody Listened

The Correct Unit of Documentation, Architecture, and Grease Management

The Instrument That Outperforms Every Thermometer Because It Measures What Matters

s/factory/IT department/g

The Forcing Function That Turns Generalization Into Evidence

The Metaphor That Was Correct and Insufficient

The Plateau Where Patience Is Tested and Impatience Is Punished

s/Brent/developer experience/g

The Philosophy of Finding What's Actually Broken

The Half-Million Paths You Didn't Take

It Really Is the Only Choice — Let Me Show You Why

The Rule Everyone Sets and Nobody Follows

The Heat Death of Language Design Committees

You Aren't Gonna Need It

Every Program Attempts to Expand Until It Can Read Mail

The Bag That Carries Everything and Contains Nothing