Sources of inspiration

I find work-related inspiration in many places, among others, colleagues meetups and conferences. But most inspiration comes while purposelessly roaming the internet. I’ve always been interested in more than writing the code for the software. Whether it be participating in meetings and discussions that would help me better understand the business. Gathering data to predict how a UI should be formed for optimal user experience. Learning how to avoid making poor software design decisions that would bring the nice people in operations in trouble. But also the softer things like how culture and circumstances affect us as developers and individuals.

Prior to getting the responsibility for a team, all the above would just be archived mentally as “work/software development”. These days, stuff related to work culture and people has earned its own archive label. Suddenly these things have a slightly different meaning to me.

Before I was laughing when seeing/reading things like these (and I still do):

• Don’t interrupt a programmer
• Joining a project that has legacy code
• The Seven Circles of Developer Hell

Now failing to do my job properly… the joke will be on me.

To get to the core of the matter. I would like to share the following links because they either gave me food for thought or just solidified my view on matters:

• The Psychology of Programming
• The First Rule of Programming: It’s Always Your Fault
• How terrible code gets written by perfectly sane people (now from the Internet Archive)