There is something conspicuously missing from software development education. As developers, we learn all about how to write, organize, design, share, use, and test software, but the discussion of how that software will actually be used and what it's impact on the world will be is usually an afterthought. […2 min read]
Writing code that works is hard. I've been exploring things that make software complex in an attempt to learn how to write better code. I guess "better" is subjective, but in this case I mean "easier to change" and "with fewer bugs". State is one big factor that makes software complex. Most code that does anything useful needs state, though. […5 min read]
What makes large codebases so hard to reason about, and so hard to extend? I really want to find out because I'm tired of losing my mind working on them. One paper I love called "Out of the Tar Pit", by Ben Moseley and Peter Marks, argues that state is the main source of complexity in large software systems. This article is an overview of a couple of the ideas from that paper, along with some discussion about how we might conceptually think about necessary state in software in order to improve its overall quality. […6 min read]
I get asked a lot for advice on becoming a software developer. I didn't study anything related to software in university, but now it's what I do for a living. I also spent about 3.5 years mentoring with Lighthouse Labs, a local web development bootcamp, and watched (and would like to believe at least in some cases, helped) hundreds of people of every age from wildly diverse backgrounds get jobs as software developers. […13 min read]