A Person, Artist, Software Engineer, Geologist.

Us software engineers are told we are smart, earn lots of money and are so important to the company.  We also allow this to go to our heads, forget that we have just as many issues as anybody else (maybe more) and are the root of many of the problems with software development. We want to use language X because we think it's cool. We interpet requirements for our benefit, not the clients. We work to convince others that our logic is better when issues arise. We create the bugs for QA to find. We make the software hard to understand, modify or install. We are the problem. This is a part of being human and something that we all face to some extent.  Being a Buddhist means to know what our issues are and confront them every day. The sad part is that you can see this problem behavior with many developers.  When things go wrong (as they often do), you can see the pattern of denial and defending of actions that caused the problem in the first place.   This all ta...

Think about the role you play in development.  do you write new code or do you fix bugs? It's a trick question!  Every developer's role should including fixing bugs.  We created them and we should take responsibility in fixing them too.  The notion that a developer is so important creating new code that they don't have time to fix their own error is ... well... to say the least, problematic on so many levels.  It's a problem with the company, project and the code that is written. The notion that developers that fix code are not at the same level of those assigned to new features is backwards.  Those that fix bugs have a very difficult job.  They: Do not have as much knowledge about the code as the original author. Work in a wide variety of code written by multiple developers and styles. Should not break any other code.   Do not get to refactor code but have to fix the code in place with the current design.  Even if that design is the...