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title = "Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Intro"
date = 2019-06-18
[taxonomies]
tags = ["en-au", "books", "things i learnt", "intro"]
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"Things I Learnt The Hard Way (In 30 Years of Software Development)" started
as a simple sequence of toots (the same as "tweets", but outside Twitter) when
I was thinking about a new presentation I could do.
But why "a new presentation"?
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I go around my state with a group called "Tchelinux": We usually go to
universities and talk to people starting uni, explaining things about
free/libre software and sometimes telling people about things they wouldn't
normally see in the uni curriculum.
One thing that annoys me is that there are very few presentations about "when
things go wrong". All the presentations are either prototypes or tell the good
stuff, and hide all the wrong things that could happen[^1]. Obviously, after
working 30 years in the field of software development, I saw my fair share of
things going wrong -- sometimes in unimaginable piles of crap -- and I thought
"maybe that's something people would like to hear".
And that's when the toot sequence started. Just before I noticed, I spent the
whole day just posting this kind of stuff (fortunately, my pile of "incoming"
was a bit empty at the time) and it had 30 points, plus addendums and a few
explanation points. That's when I decided to group all them in a single post.
All I thought when I grouped everything in a post was "this will make things
easier for the people following the thread on Mastodon". But then the post
appeared on Reddit. And Twitter. And HackerNews. And YCombinator. And none of
those where mine.
But here is the thing: Each point was limited by the toot size, which is 500
characters. Sometimes that's not enough to expand the point, explain it
properly and add some examples.
And that's how the idea to write this "book" came to life.
One thing you must keep in mind here: *These are my options*. I understand
that not everything is so black and white as put here, and some people's
experiences may not match things here. Also, you get a bit cynical about
technology after 30 years. So... thread carefully, 'cause here be dragons.
[^1]: Yup, I'm guilty of that too.
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