Four short links: 9 Sep 2020
Software Engineering, Architects and Plumbers, Pair Programming with AI, and Comments
- Things I Learned to Become a Senior Software Engineer — Full of relatable growth moments, such as changing your code to make the test pass vs understanding why the test failed.
- The Future is Software Engineers Who Can’t Code — “There are lot of definitions of what a developer is […] It’s not just people who write code.” […] Microsoft has even given these “civilian” programmers a persona: Mort. […] The fictional “Mort” is a skilled professional, anyone from a business analyst to a construction site cost estimator, who needs computers to perform specific functions without mastering the intricacies of full-blown programming. As Mel Conway called it, the profession is bifurcating into architects and plumbers. Architects make complex pieces of software, plumbers bolt those pieces together.
- Pair Programming with AI — This makes sense to me: We don’t need complete, perfect solutions; we need partial solutions in situations where we don’t have all the information, and we need the ability to explore those solutions with an (artificially) intelligent partner.
- Writing System Software: Code Comments — Absolutely the best thing on software engineering that a software engineer will read all month. This is GOLD.
