Developer Notes

The 10 commandments of software development

Posted 14 Sep 2014

A couple of weeks ago fellow senior Bastiaan de Rijber and I were venting some frustration on Skype. We realized that we find ourselves repeating the same tidbits of wisdom over and over again to developers in conversations, code reviews and post mortems on failures, big and and small.

I’ll admit the title seems a bit ‘holier-than-thou’ so I’m going to stick to the theme and do this all biblical style:

1. Thou shall not assume, for assumptions are the mother of all fuckups
   
2. Thou shall not blame the tooling, for it's probably thou who has made the mistake
   
3. Thou shall clean up thy shit, for there is no greater pleasure than deleting code
   
4. Thou shall not optimize prematurely, for premature optimization is the root of all evil
   
5. Thou must find the root cause before applying the 'fix'
   
6. Thou shall not practice the black art of multi threading without Jedi assistance
   
7. Thou shall not commit shortly before going home/on vacation/to sleep
   
8. Thou shall review thy code before committing
   
9. Thou shall not proclaim the obvious in comments
   
10. Thou shall not claim 'It works on my machine'