Top 6 List of Programming Top 10 Lists

Just wanted to say thanks for posting wonderful articles time and time again, Jeff. Not only does your blog make my day, but so often I can use these tips in every day life.

Omar Shahine’s #5: Make hard problems look easy, or Jerry Weinberg’s How to treat someone with less knowledge.

Nice little daily reminders of stuff I’d forgotten :slight_smile: Thanks Jeff!

Good list… thanks for posting.

ditto!

I have a list as well. However my list is more of a daily guideline.

http://www.benkruger.com/2007/02/bens-software-manifesto.html

Software development is a kissing cousin of engineering (if not an engineering discipline itself)

ABET (a href="http://www.abet.org/"http://www.abet.org//a) would say it’s more than just a kissing cousin, as they accredited a Software Engineering degree where I went to college. I was a Computer Engineer, myself, and based on what I heard from my friends in the Software major, the difference was they got plenty of indoctrination on “process” (read: waterfall) and “business”.

Top 10 Tips for Working at Microsoft (as a contractor)

  1. You are scum
  2. You are NOT part of the team
  3. Everyone else is smarter than you
  4. Don’t believe what they tell you
  5. People will not talk to you
  6. Don’t piss anyone off
  7. Don’t try to accomplish anything
  8. Don’t step on anyone’s toes
  9. Head down, fingers on keyboard
  10. Don’t try to fix anything

I like very much the lists from Jerry Weinberg and Omar Shahine, and I think that, yes, the best book is “The Pragmatic Programmer”…

I didn’t like LoggedOnUser’s list. Something about it bugged me.

By LoggedOnUser’s own criteria, their list is just as lame because it’s so general and pretty much not specific to software development. e.g. Think of designing boxes for packaging. Everything listed is equally relevant to box building, shipbuilding, painting, secretarial work, etc. Putting in a few software centric keywords like ‘open source’ just doesn’t cut it for me.

Let’s get a list that is specific to software (or aspects of software) like (and in no particular order)

  1. Code is meant to be read by people, not computers.
  2. Computers are stupid. They’ll do anything you tell them, even stupid things
  3. The compiler is your friend, provide type-safety whenever possible.
  4. Convention over configuration.
  5. Don’t ‘gold plate’.
    DO Look to the future to see how things will evolve.
    DO NOT add every possible combination from the start. There is a good likelihood you are wrong, and you have wasted effort, introduced bugs, introduced dead code, and raised complexity.

Sorry LoggedIn, they are valid points, and following them would make anyone a better person, but they’re not specific to what we do.

I does want to now about this topic

How come your articles is the same as http://nsdhami.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/top-6-list-of-programming-top-10-lists/
I was wondering who copy whose work? I have no idea? Either one of you need to clarify the issue. I am so confused atm. And once again I am not sure the articles is reliable or not. But yours is dated last year while that author Narendra Dhami is dated this year. Oh well…

Ohiit did you post the same comment on the other blog that you’re referring to? The mere fact that this post from Jeff is dated more than a year prior to the other one says a lot.

Michael McDonough: The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School

the link is broken, the correct link is
http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=2037

Very Good Tips and Ideas, Thanks a lot for sharing :slight_smile:

But Number 10 from Andres Taylor is just so Funny…

hahahaha… and true… hahahaha

Must read by all programmers

Definitely, everyone makes mistakes.
http://extreme-java.blogspot.com/