Advice to new Programmers

The idea was that, once they had done two or three projects for customers, they could take on an apprentice and mentor that person. We had younger people, and we had more women than other firms. We had Eve Anderson and Tracy Adams—two of the most senior people at the company were female, which was kind of unusual. We never wanted to have more than

... See more

One piece of advice I'd have for anyone seeking to do something similar is that a problem shared is a problem halved. Whilst I can't advise you to lower your ambition without being a hypocrite, the amount of extra time I invested in this project because I had a highly specific vision is kind of unreal. This could have been mitigated by having a dev... See more

I can only truly speak for myself as a 10x developer, and here’s what I believe to be different about me and the other 10x (or even 100x) developers vs my 1–2x peers:

• Understanding how things work.


• I hate “magic” software frameworks and I will spend countless hours making sure I understand what’s going on behind the scenes before I’ll write productio

... See more

it, the book taught me the dictionary. The rest of it, the bulk of what I learned about software engineering—how to split a big problem into smaller ones, how to connect the pieces together, how to figure out why it didn’t work, and how to decide when it was finished—I figured out on my own by trial and error, and everybody else in the class figure

... See more