There is a lot of talk about programming. There is also a lot of talk about improving the craft of programming through architecture, TDD, DDD, Agile, pairing, or any host of frameworks or protocols for improving our practice.
We can discuss engineering vs. programming. Automation and DevOps as methods that impose feedback mechanisms to improve things faster.
We can talk about the psychology of software engineering and branch onwards and upwards to processes (Agile vs Waterfall), how we are organised, complexity theory and beyond.
Or we can carry on deeper into psychology and then beyond it to the philosophy of software engineering (why are we doing this?) and then to epistemology (the nature of knowledge itself).
It’s tempting to overthink things, but I believe that there’s a sweet spot for learning to write good software systems.
Writing software is probably somewhere between programming art and craft. While the rest is nice to have, it’s far from necessary.
So, how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? And what lies beneath? Or is it even a loop?
Don’t overthink it.
