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Fear makes you a worse programmer

jvns.ca · 886 words · saved by 1 readers

Does anyone have good writing about fear + programming (and how being afraid to make important changes makes you a worse programmer?) and I feel like there’s this really important line between caution (a++ excellent) and fear (which holds you back from doing necessary work) A lot of super interesting discussion ensued, and I’d like to talk about some of it. Before I start, Ryan Kennedy linked me to this slide deck of a presentation he gave called Fear Driven Development which I absolutely loved, and I think you should look at it. I think my favorite sentence from that presentation is “Fear creates local maximums.” I find that when I’m afraid, I become super conservative. WE CANNOT POSSIBLY MAKE THIS CHANGE WHAT IF IT BREAKS?! And this means worse software! It’s actually kind of disastrous. If you’re scared of making changes, you can’t make something dramatically better, or do that big code cleanup. Maybe you can’t even deploy the code that you already wrote and tested, because it feels

Yesterday morning, I asked on Twitter: Does anyone have good writing about fear + programming (and how being afraid to make important changes makes you a worse programmer?) and I feel like there's this really important line between caution (a++ excellent) and fear (which holds you back from doing necessary work) A lot of super interesting discussion ensued , and I'd like to talk about some of it. Before I start, Ryan Kennedy linked me to this slide deck of a presentation he gave called Fear Driven Development which I absolutely loved, and I think you should look at it. I think my favorite sent

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