How to Build a Great Platform
In the field of software engineering, we often talk about using or building a “platform.” Let’s talk about what that really means and the principles for how to build a great platform.…
What Makes a Great Developer Experience?
I’ve been working for over 20 years in the field of “developer experience,” where we help developers be more effective, efficient, and happy, by improving tools, systems, and processes. I have been…
An Analogy for Software Development
Sometimes, I have to explain software development to people who are not software developers. Over the years, I have come up with an analogy that explains what software development is like and…
Code Simplicity: The Fundamentals of Software is Now Free
About a year ago, a Twitter user tagged me and some other programming authors in a thread where they described the barriers to accessing computer programming books in their country. I’ve been…
What is a Monorepo, Really?
I have now worked in developer productivity organizations at a company with a very advanced mono-repo (Google) and a company with a very advanced multi-repo system (LinkedIn), and I have to tell…
Reasoning and Choice
One of the most important properties about any software system is the ability to understand what it is going to do without having to run it. This concept is usually referred to…
The Definition of Simplicity
Many years ago, I wrote a blog post explaining what was wrong with computers, and essentially saying the problem was complexity. Several years after that, I published Code Simplicity, which was essentially…
Fires vs. Strategy
There’s a point that I’ve been making to engineers recently that I realized would be valuable if shared more widely. When you do engineering work, there are different types of tasks that…
How to Learn to Program
One question that people ask me all the time is, “How do I become a programmer?” Or, “How do I learn to program?”…
How to be a Great Programmer: Awareness, Understanding, and Responsibility
There are three key factors to being or becoming a great programmer: awareness, understanding, and responsibility. I’ve talked a lot about the subject of understanding. Heck, I even named my most recent…