See the first post in The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition series for an introduction. Challenge 1 Think about a design principle you use regularly. Is it intended to make things easy-to-change? Pure functions! Outside of Functional Programming, this is perhaps a lesser used/considered design principle - often superseded by principles such as SOLID and DRY. However, I have found it to be a very effective principle to follow no matter the programming paradigm being used.
See the first post in The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition series for an introduction. Challenge 1 Start learning a new language this week. Always programmed in the same old language? Try Clojure, Elixir, Elm, F#, Go, Haskell, Python, R, ReasonML, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Swift, TypeScript, or anything else that appeals and/or looks as if you might like it. Not long after reading this chapter for the first time, I started learning Clojure using Daniel Higginbothams excellent book Clojure for the Brave and True.
See the first post in The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition series for an introduction. Challenge 1 Look at the software tools and operating systems that you use regularly. Can you find any evidence that these organizations and/or developers are comfortable shipping software they know is not perfect? As a user, would you rather (1) wait for them to get all the bugs out, (2) have complex software and accept some bugs, or (3) opt for simpler software with fewer defects?
See the first post in The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition series for an introduction. Challenge 1 While reviewing a draft of the first edition, John Lakos raised the following issue: The soldiers progressively deceive the villagers, but the change they catalyze does them all good. However, by progressively deceiving the frog, you’re doing it harm. Can you determine whether you’re making stone soup or frog soup when you try to catalyze change?
See the first post in The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition series for an introduction. Challenge 1 Help strengthen your team by surveying your project neighborhood. Choose two or three broken windows and discuss with your colleagues what the problems are and what could be done to fix them. I’ll discuss one example from work recently - exact details removed of course. Our current main project is the next version (3) of our main API.