ESSAYS — 04
Writing
Occasional essays on judging, planning, and owning software. Written for the people who sign, not the people who ship.
Software does not travel
The risk is never the technology. It is the assumptions the technology encodes, and assumptions are invisible to everyone who shares them.
The best system is the one you can give away
Why I build to be replaced, and why that is not the same as leaving.
How I read a codebase I didn’t write
What fifteen years of inheriting other people’s systems taught me about judging one in ten days.
The dev shop will say yes
Why “can you build it?” is the wrong question to put to people who are paid to answer yes.
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