Software development topics I've changed my mind on after 10 years in the industry

Published 2025-02-03

Four years ago I posted about the same topic.
A kind email reminded me its time for another check in.

Things I now believe, which past me would've squabbled with:

Simple is not given. It takes constant work
There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity
Typed languages are essential on teams with mixed experience levels
Java is a great language because it's boring
REPLs are not useful design tools (though, they are useful exploratory tools)
Most programming should be done long before a single line of code is written
Frontend development is a nightmare world of Kafkaesque awfulness I no longer enjoy
Elegance is not a real metric
Good management is invaluable. (I went most of my career before seeing it done well)
DynamoDB is a good database (IFF your workload lines up with what it's offering)
Objects are extremely good at what they're good at. Blind devotion to functional is dumb.

Engineering is mostly about communication
Never go full monad in Java.
The query planner is a cruel mistress
If I think something is easy, that's a sure sign I don't understand it.
You have to give younger devs room to explore and make mistakes
You have to actively invest in improving your soft skills (and investments pay back immediately)
Very few abstractions exist in general application development. Just write the code you need
Contrarily, library development is about abstractions. Spend time hunting for an algebra
ORMs are the devil in all languages and all implementations. Just write the damn SQL
The trouble with functional programming is functional programmers
Given a long enough time horizon, you'll deeply regret building on Serverless Functions
Types are assertions we make about the world
Distributed locking is still really hard for some reason
Formal modeling and analysis is an essential skill set
Isolation is the most important property of a good integration suite.
DynamoDB is the worst possible choice for general application development
Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are
Gradual, dependently typed languages are the future
You literally cannot add too many comments to test code (I challenge anyone to try)

People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things.
Code coverage has absolutely nothing to do with code quality (in many cases, it's inversely proportional)
Monoliths remain pretty good
It's very hard to beat decades of RDBMS research and improvements
Micro-services require justification (they've increasingly just become assumed)
Most projects (even inside of AWS!) don't need to "scale" and are damaged by pretending so
93%, maybe 95.2%, of project managers, could disappear tomorrow to either no effect or a net gain in efficiency. (this estimate is up from 4 years ago)

We'll see which of these have flipped at year 15.