#cowboy developer

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Logging as an Anti-Pattern – Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya – Medium

“You can use logging for everything!” — #CowboyDeveloper

You can use Logging for everything • Metrics: print(), then cut/paste into google-sheets, and generate all the charts you need • Alerting: tail -f | grep , and then pipe to sendmail. • Monitoring: Alerting, but across multiple terms • Tracing: Add unique IDs to each log statement. (Yes. Actual examples I've seen...) • Debugging: print().  D-uh.

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Seniority and Soft Skills

Domain-specific skills don't make for "seniority" - it's the Soft Skills...

The difference between Mid-Level and Senior people isn’t their domain specific expertise, it’s the oh-so-important “soft skills” - Pragmatism, Humility, Teachability, Self-Awareness, and the like.

Quite a few engineers (and people for that matter!) never make it past this stage, especially if they develop any level of significant success at this stage. #CowboyDevelopers are a prime example, as are most (not only tech!) CEOs who hit it big during a bubble.

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“Nobody here is qualified enough to review my code!”

Beware the desire for control - by letting others review their work, #CowboyDevelopers believe they ede control over it, and to them this is an attack on the very core of their being.

eventual-consistency-git: Everybody develops against their own branch, and cherry picks from each other to get updates

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Cowboy Developers, and Requirements – Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya – Medium

“I don’t need requirements — I know what I’m doing”  — #CowboyDeveloper

Maybe, just maybe, you might want to consider the likelihood that the product folks might actually know what they’re doing

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Why You Re-invented The Wheel – Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya – Medium

“I just didn’t know” is, maybe, the only acceptable excuse for re-inventing the wheel

"I just didn't know" is, maybe, the only acceptable excuse for re-inventing the wheel Unless you're a #CowboyDeveloper, in which case the wheel *Needed* re-inventing, right? 

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“Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

How a #CowboyDeveloper operates 1. I’m smart 2. Therefore, I know everything worth knowing 3. Therefore, if I don’t know it, it isn’t worth knowing 4. Therefore any precedent that I’m unaware of, is worthless 

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The Knowns, The Unknowns, and Engineering – Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya – Medium

The difference between Good Engineering and Bad  is the ability to distinguish between the Achievable and the Impossible.

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How do *you* make decisions? – Mahesh Paolini-Subramanya – Medium

“IT DEPENDS” Seriously, how do you decide what to do? Do you just wing it? Or do you have a detailed “if — then — else” flowchart?

Overconfidence is the bane of my existence in Software Engineering. Lords preserve me from #CowboyDevelopers who • Disregard emergent behavior, and assume everything is Obvious • Mistake complex situations (no correct answer, needs lots of experimentation) for complicated (amenable to engineering solutions) ones • Don't recognize chaos when they see it.