Free software wisdom
Every week veteran KDE contributor Kevin Ottens posts a bunch of thought-provoking links on his blog, and last week’s post contained one that I found particularly enlightening:
It’s a collection of wisdom written from someone named Lars Wirzenius who started his software development career decades ago and has seen it all. While I don’t have 40 years of programming under my belt, I do have 16 years in programming, QA, release engineering, and management, and everything Lars wrote rings true to me. I’d encourage everyone to give it a read!
Here are my favorite takeaways:
- Take care of yourself, or else you’re no good to others.
- Useful software is too big to create alone, so your most important skill is the ability to collaborate.
- Write caveman code anyone can understand, unless complexity can be justified by measurably and consistently better performance.
- Do work in small chunks, and repeat.
- Diversity of perspective is important, or else you’ll end up accidentally making something that only works for a narrow slice of people.
- Know who the intended user is, and try to see things from their point of view.
- Developing software is political. Deal with it.
- Learn to write, and write stuff down.
But do check out the whole thing!