What blog posts influenced your thinking the most?
21 points by mt
21 points by mt
Interested in hearing your opinions, I usually learn a lot from it.
For me it has to be Parse, Don’t Validate and early joelonsoftware.
I keep my list here. I started about three years ago because I was tired of losing quite a few already.
Oh, what a treat, thanks, I got my reading list for the nearest future!
On simplicity, I also enjoyed "Why C++ Sails When The Vasa Sank".
My similar list is here https://matklad.github.io/links.html
I’m a big Sandi Metz fan, and one of my favorites of her’s is The Wrong Abstraction. Abstraction is incredibly important in our craft, but the wrong one is more dangerous than no abstraction at all.
I hadn't read this one since the dawn of the age of agents, and it hits a bit different now, cause man, agents really really like to stick to the ruts that those who came before left, like, even more than people. With people I can just link them this post and tell them not to write conveniences for a future thats unlikely to arrive. Sometimes it takes a couple remindereminders, but they get it. Agents never learn, and the code becomes an intractable nest of context objects and logic in places that make no sense.
He gets some haters here (it should be remarked that people having any opinion at all about a blogger is notable in itself) but I really liked the post by Sean Goedecke on how to actually ship things: https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/
It is actually very possible to build a successful career within large tech companies without actually shipping anything. I am prone to the perfectionist’s curse of endless creativity when it comes to doing ever more testing and validation, resulting in a sort of Zeno situation where I get overwhelmed chasing down the fractal tail of issues to resolve before completing something. So I found the post useful with its focus on repeatedly asking yourself what the shortest possible path at that moment is to shipping something, and how “shipping” is socially constructed.
You Don't Need to Work on Hard Problems put into words how I started feeling about seven or eight years into my career. I think a lot of people would benefit from it.
slumming with basic programmers is a good reminder of the value of delivering an end product versus having the perfect codebase. it didn't really influence my thinking about how I work, but it definitely influenced the way I look at the industry as a whole.
I'm influenced more by writing blog posts than reading them. It's like my entire thinking process.
It's not what you're expecting, but Typing the technical interview and its related posts by aphyr showed me just how entertaining writing about programming can be and forever serves as an inspiration (I really, really want to try my hand at replicating it one of these days, but I'm sure it wouldn't be as good).
There are plenty of technical posts which resonate, but I don't remember these as clearly.
This has been number 1 for me in recent years: "Formal Methods Only Solve Half My Problems" https://brooker.co.za/blog/2022/06/02/formal.html.
one of the humblest and most sublime written piece on programming i've read is the late Tony Hoare's acceptance speech: The Emperor's New Clothes.
here is the best line:
"At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."
Moxie Marlinspike posted a blog entry of career advice that really nailed home an important point: we are what we do and saying otherwise is just deceiving ourselves.
This Moron Lab blog post was very influential for me. Many applications I built since apply the pattern of having a message loop, or collection of them, with a purely functional core that returns a new state plus side effects. This post also explains the idea that standards should stabilize rather than evolve well.
(This is not an endorsement of other writing by that author, or of what the project outlined in the post has evolved into now 16 years later.)
Also, not a blog post, but Simple Made Easy and The Value of Values by Rich Hickey, which at a high level are about the same topic.
"Parse, Don't Validate" easily is the one I can recall by name. Maybe the title is just perfect to get the thing to stick in my memory.
Not many bolts from the blue I can recall howevermany years later, but Avery Pennarun's SimSWE 4: Wants, Needs, and Chasm-Crossing is one.