The first rule you need to observe to become a Professional Developer

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The inspiration for this post came to me while reading a few invitations I received from some of the “modern contracting” websites. I’d like to thank them for giving me a chance of some good bashing, but I won’t write their names here as they don’t deserve free advertisement.

A bit of background

I registered on some of these websites some time ago, because I needed to outsource some work I could not do myself. Despite being the Client and, thus, looking for someone to hire, I also completed my professional profile in the Contractors section. I did it  because I like to know the background of people with whom I collaborate, and I think it’s only fair that they get to know about me as well.

The drawback of this is that now I also appear as a Contractor, which allows other Clients to invite me to submit proposals to their projects. I was aware of this, and I thought it would not have been a big deal to reject an invitation, from time to time. Also, I saw it as an opportunity to get in touch with new prospective Clients and establish a relationship outside these platforms. Things went as expected for a while, until I started receiving invitations so disgustingly arrogant that ticked me off. Read more

The effects of Technological Religion – Case Study

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This post is an addendum to Golden Rule: a Developer is not a Priest. For better understanding of the context, I recommend to read that post first.

Technological Religion is something I found in several places where I worked and, trust me, its effects have never been positive. I remember a case where the fanaticism of two teams was so strong that it created a barrier between them. Here’s their (sad) story.

Once upon a time…

In a town, somewhere in Europe, there was a Company in which two teams lived in not-so-much harmony. Read more

Golden Rule: a Developer is not a Priest

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One may ask what do the two figures can have in common. It’s better explained with a preamble.

Today I was reviewing a website (link no longer available, sorry) created by my protégé, when I spotted something that inspired me to write this post. As I usually do, I visited it using several browsers, to check if pages render correctly in all of them. When I opened it with Internet Explorer, all I got was the following message:

We don’t like Internet Explorer.

I’ve seen many websites declaring a browser preference, usually in the form of “this website is optimized for browser X, version Y”, but this is the first one that clearly rejects one so “harshly”. I know the author of the website and I’m aware of the reason why he decided to do it, but, personally, I don’t recommend taking such position.

The message reminded me of an (unfortunately) common issue in the world of Software Development: technological religion. This term can can be described as an almost-fanatic preference of a tool over another, and it explains the title.  Read more