I Wish I Never Learned to Code
Professional Life

If you think those browsing habits are bad, just wait until you hear about the kinds of conversations I have with other software engineers. As a whole, engineers tend to be fairly opinionated. Pedantry runs in our blood. Do you indent your code using spaces or tabs? Are you more of a Vim or an Emacs fan? Chrome or Firefox?

In wiser circles these conversations will ultimately lead to someone asking “Does it really matter?”. Bikeshedding is a real phenomenon and needs to be carefully kept in check.

xkcd — Real Programmers

As more and more companies adopt agile methodologies, from time to time we have to weigh the comparative trade-offs between using Waterfall, Scrum, or Kanban development lifecycles. We all enjoy bashing on Waterfall as an artifact of the past used by old-fashioned and inefficient corporations. However, the Scrum versus Kanban war rages on.

“You’re a believer in Scrum, you say? I’ll bet you love your artificial time boxes that cause hurried code to be imprudently shipped in order to meet an imaginary deadline before the sprint ends.”

Dilbert — Scott Adams

Speaking of agile, what is a story point, anyway? A measure of time? Effort? Complexity? Risk? All of the above? You and I could likely spend hours debating the merits of each definition without coming to a mutual understanding.

At some point this may devolve into more bikeshedding, but being able to understand one another and communicate effectively is critical, and that includes having a shared understanding of the terms we use throughout the day.

Frontend development opens up a whole other world of talking points, most notably: “When are we finally going to drop support for Internet Explorer?” I have to walk the fine line between hating on Internet Explorer and wanting to drop it and simultaneously understanding the need to support it for those of our customers that are stuck using it. (Those poor unfortunate souls…)
['Tyler Hawkins']
['JavaScript', 'Programming', 'Satire', 'Heroku', 'Humor']