I'm Jay Dan Howard!

I believe compassion makes tech worthwhile

Evolving list of loosely held, hopefully not pretentious sounding, and strong beliefs about software engineering, mayhaps only applying to the web world:

• Code that feels good to write is productive code
• Teams should use auto-formatters
• Unit test files that have more lines of mocks than tests is a really bad sign since they cement contracts that will be null and void when business needs and implementations change
• Dogma is as rampant in tech as it is anywhere else people are involved. We should always stay open-minded
• Everything in software is about getting things to communicate "well"
• To people: other developers, business stakeholders, users, API consumers
• To machines: clients to services, services to services, processes to processes
• To present-tense code: interfaces between functions, classes, network calls
• To past-tense code: gracefully handling old versions of code after deploying to prod
• To future-tense code: today's code will happily swap in and out with tomorrow's code
• We need to remember performance is a measurement of the latency and throughput of the communication between or within machines
• Performance claims that aren't measurable tend to be a result of engineers being shy about being called artists. We should not be shy
• Large multi-hundred-line PRs indicate problems in the process
• Poor developer utilization
• Slower and more painful feedback cycles (requested changes have to happen in the service code and in tests)
• Behind-the-scene iteration from single developer battling dragons