Advice for new software devs who've read all those other advice essays

You've probably heard the advice that software as a field is changing all the time , and that you shouldn't get swept up in the framework treadmill, just focus on learning fundamental skills. This is a true, but doesn't explain the "why". For structural reasons, information in software propagates really quickly. This is due to a lot of factors (int

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Julia Evans once said "behind every best practice is a horror story." If you don't understand a Best Practice, look for the horror story that inspired it. It might make the best practice make sense. It might turn out to be something that's completely irrelevant to you, and then you can feel comfortable doing a different practice instead.

1. People don't listen to me because I'm a good programmer, they listen to me because I'm a good writer. The same is true of pretty much everybody you'll read. This doesn't mean you should automatically reject everything, but it means you should carefully think about it and evaluate how it applies to your situation. And take any argument about "object

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At some point you will discover the Right Way to program, the thing which makes this all make sense , and you'll be convinced that the whole field would be so much better off if everybody else programmed the Right Way, too. For me the Right Way was test-driven development; for you it might be functional programming, lisp, formal methods or one of a

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