A Pragmatic Programmer takes charge of his or her own career, and isn’t afraid to admit ignorance or error.
Don’t rely on the properties of things you can’t control.
Entropy is a term from physics that refers to the amount of “disorder” in a system.
By coding at a higher level of abstraction, you are free to concentrate on solving domain problems, and can ignore petty implementation details.
Great software today is often preferable to perfect software tomorrow. If you give your users something to play with early, their feedback will often lead you to a better eventual solution.
In some ways, programming is like painting. You start with a blank canvas and certain basic raw materials. You use a combination of science, art, and craft to determine what to do with them.
Often this is an orthogonality issue. When teams are organized with lots of overlap, members are confused about responsibilities. Every change needs a meeting of the entire team, because any one of them might be affected.
The DRY principle tells us to keep the low-level knowledge in the code, where it belongs, and reserve the comments for other, high-level explanations.
There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel no one else has a right to blame us.
Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship.
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea if it’s the only one you have.
Don’t be like the frog. Keep an eye on the big picture. Constantly review what’s happening around you, not just what you personally are doing.
In the same way a woodworker invests the time in a jig, a programmer can build a code generator. Once built, it can be used throughout the life of the project at virtually no cost.
One of the cornerstones of the pragmatic philosophy is the idea of taking responsibility for yourself and your actions in terms of your career advancement, your project, and your day-to-day work.
One broken window – a badly designed piece of code, a poor management decision that the team must live with for the duration of the project – is all it takes to start the decline. If you find yourself working on a project with quite a few broken windows, it’s all too easy to slip into the mindset of “All the rest of this code is crap, I’ll just follow suit.
All programs transform data, converting an input into an output. And yet when we think about design, we rarely think about creating transformations. Instead we worry about classes and modules, data structures and algorithms, languages and frameworks.
Before you start to look at the bug, make sure that you are working on code that built cleanly – without warnings. We routinely set compiler warning levels as high as possible. It doesn’t make sense to waste time trying to find a problem that the computer could find for you! We need to concentrate on the harder problems at hand.
The best way to start fixing a bug is to make it reproducible. After all, if you can’t reproduce it, how will you know if it is ever fixed?
It is enough. This is the right place.” Brigham Young uttered those words when his wagon reached the mouth of Emigration Canyon and he gazed out at this valley.
Everything emanated from the temple. On the northern side of the oval Salt Lake Valley, the earliest Mormon arrivals set aside ten acres for what they called Temple Square.