Early in my career I heard someone say this on the topic of complexity in Software Engineering:

“A good Software Engineer can take a complex problem and build a solution.
A great Software Engineer can take a complex problem and build a simple solution.”

I’ve worked in the world of Software Engineering for the past 13 years or so, and I can say without hesitation that this statement is absolutely one hundred percent true. Any quality Software Engineer can solve basically any technical challenge. The broader issue, however, is that rarely are real-world problems solved by overcoming technical challenges alone. Software is more than technical; it’s also an art.

The book Clean Code[1] describes this area of the skill set as “code-sense”:

A programmer without “code-sense” can look at a messy module and recognize the mess but will have no idea what to do about it. A programmer with “code-sense” will look at a messy module and see options and variations. The “code-sense” will help that programmer choose the best variation and guide him or her to plot a sequence of behavior preserving transformations to get from here to there.

In short, a programmer who writes clean code is an artist who can take a blank screen through a series of transformations until it is an elegantly coded system.

There are various facets of design all throughout Software Engineering: user-interface design, architecture design, database design, data model design, api design, design of documentation, design of source code to be unit testable, design of components to be modular and replaceable, design that supports separation of concerns, and design of source code to be readable and easy to understand. Just to name a few.

Software Engineers get confronted with design challenges such as these every day. Without good code-sense the business problems will still get solved (technically), but the real goal should go beyond just solving the problem. The goal should be to be to solve it as cleanly and simply as possible.

[1] Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin. Page 7 under the section “The Total Cost of Owning a Mess”.

Some of the now-defunct blogs surprised me. Some used to be really active and seemed to flourish from a successful business model. Others were personal projects by highly respected, high-profile, authors. I learned a lot from these blogs, and they were invaluable to propelling my career further, so to see them dead was honestly a little disappointing.

My Own Non-Existent Blog

Then I realized, I also had an active blog during this time. I’m guilty of allowing my blog to suffer the exact same fate. After looking back at the many life changes that have occurred for me and my family over the past eight or so years I can give you some insight as to why some blogs may just fade out of existence.

• At the time of this writing I’m 34 years old and have 4 young children. Time not only flies, but it seems to speed up as you get older, so frankly I consider the time I have right now with my family to be the most valuable. Everything else takes a lower priority: exercising, personal projects, and yes, especially blogging.
• At some point I realized that I definitely appreciate quality over quantity. I don’t want to write frequent blog posts just because SEO specialists or marketers recommend that the content be fresh. And you know what, I certainly don’t want to read filler content on other blogs either. As I said previously, my time is valuable, so I only want the really good stuff. The rest is just noise.
• The season of my life when I was blogging more actively was when I was more entry-level and junior in my career. So I was trying to absorb as much knowledge, and improve my professional skills, as much as possible. I had a singular focus on becoming a better developer and designer. But you know what else I learned? There’s a lot more to life than the Internet and computers and career. The responsibilities of life have forced me to also learn about an array of other things such as being a good husband, raising children, finances, health, home ownership and maintenance. Most of which I just simply would not blog about even if I had the energy to do so.

Conclusion

I went through the feeds in my Old Reader account and purged everything that had died. There are still a few possible gems remaining, but I’m going to attempt to find some new blogs that are worth following and give this RSS thing another go, since it was so invaluable to me nearly a decade ago.

Also, I’m going to write the occasional blog post here. So if you want to follow along and subscribe here’s my feedburner URL:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/benharrison/cc

• Use at least two partitions (or hard drives)
• Keep the operating system, and programs on the main partition
• Store documents, media, and everything else that should survive an O/S reinstall on a separate partition
• Automate a backup process for the O/S partition. Ideally this should be on another physical drive, but for software-only crashes it’s still sufficient to store on a separate partition of the same disk.
• Automate a backup procedure for the documents folder, and any other important media
• Backup the documents folder to multiple locations (2nd hard drive, dedicated thumb drive, ftp site, dropbox)
• Backups can never be too redundant
• Keep the operating system as lean and efficient as possible
• Use portable versions of software as much as possible. Keep them in an “Apps” directory in the dropbox folder.
• Use a password manager, and use a unique and difficult password for all sites

Hardware:

• Buy the best monitor, keyboard, mouse, desk, and chair you can afford.
• Buy the best processor you can afford
• Purchase everything else with bang-for-the-buck in mind. Then upgrade over time, as needed.
• Don’t spend more on a graphics card than the cost of a modern video game console
• Use an external hard drive for backups and media storage
• Use a battery backup
• Stability and reliability are

File Formats:

• Use Rich Text Format (.rtf) for word documents
• DRM Free MP3, AVI
• 7z
• PDF