Software & Technology

Some years ago, building a side project meant finding time wherever you could. Late nights, weekends, or early mornings to squeeze some work in before your real job starts....

Art history shows us that we tend to move between adding "unnecessary" elaborate decorations to clean styles and back again. It's almost an endless cycle repeated over and over. This cycle happens in the different arts and other fields where design is involved, like software. Let's trace it in architecture first....

Let me introduce you to WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s. WordStar 4.0 As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write “A Song of Ice and Fire”. Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it: It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital, if I'd wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital.George R.R. Martin This program embodies the concept of finished software — a software you can use forever with no unneeded changes. ...

We all try to create good and clean code, projects that are maintainable and easy to change and yet, we don’t appreciate when we have one. Do you remember the last time you easily change something in your code? Maybe it was a simple constant that was only in one place, or a new parameter in an API endpoint that was fast to test. You might remember but I bet you didn’t stop to appreciate how easy the change was.

When creating software, you’ll make mistakes. Sometimes they’ll be huge, sometimes they’ll be small but you can always learn from them if you spend some extra time documenting them. In order to learn from those mistakes and try to avoid them in the future you can develop a bug log. We’ll see here what that is and how it works but I promise it helps.