The Pragmatic Programmer - Chapter 1 Notes

The Pragmatic Mindset: Chapter 1 Summary

It’s Your Life

• Your career direction is your responsibility
• It’s your life- you have the power to change,create and do what ever you want.
• ”You can change your organization or change your organization”

The Cat Ate My Source Code

• Take the responsibility of the code you produce and let other team members count on you.
• Instead of excuses provide the solutions
• "I Don't Know" is okay: As long as it is followed by "...but I will find out."

Software Entropy

• One messy function encourages the rest of the team also to be messy leading to a messy codebase.
• So do not keep at least one badly designed piece of code - at least add a note or bring up in the discussions.
• Address the code debt/technical debt immediately

Stone Soup and Boiled Frogs

• Avoiding startup fatigue by being a catalyst for change
• You can start the change by just doing your part
• You have to keep an eye on the overall project - the big picture

Good Enough Software

• Make quality a requirement issue
• Just build a software that is good for the use case and for the users without over optimizing it.

Your Knowledge Portfolio

• Treat you career as a financial investment
• Update your knowledge and experience since both of them have an expiring date