• Why do smart devs write silly code? Exhibit B: I Just Need to Confirm Something (But I'm Pretty Sure I'm Right)

  Jul 23, 2025• Cognitive Biases in Code Engineering Research

  The previous chapter was all about anchoring bias, which makes us cling to the first idea we come across. This chapter is dedicated to confirmation bias and accessibility bias, which...

• Self-Documenting Code Concept 4: Embrace Copy-Paste

  Jul 1, 2025• Self-Documenting Code

  What’s the point of documentation? To help other people use your code. What’s the point of your code? To help other people solve their problem. If no one can/is willing...

• What is the most sought-after trait of a developer?

  Feb 9, 2025• Opinion People

  This is so easy to answer! This post doesn’t even need more than just an intro. It’s: reliably getting stuff done well. 🤝 It’s delivering (really emphasis on delivering) results...

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Engineering Research

Posts that draw from research papers

• Why do smart devs write silly code? Exhibit A: Because Writing a Fresh Query Is Too Much Work

  Jul 21, 2025

  It works on my machine. This might just be the original example of bias that we, developers, just can’t seem...

• The Interview Process isn't broken, it is intolerant by design

  Jun 10, 2021

  At the moment, the IT industry is considered a pretty prestigious profession. It attracts lots and lots of people because...

• Software estimation is a delusion

  Nov 4, 2020

  You will never be able to accurately estimate the time and effort it will take you to build a piece...

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People

...in the world of IT

• Why do Developers Argue so Much? Code Hard, Argue Harder

  Mar 31, 2025

  So, have you also noticed that developers have a certain … fondness for arguing? If you haven’t, I can assure...

• Opinion: In Defence of Hierarchical Command Structures

  Jan 31, 2025

  Developers. Aren’t we just a most … argumentative bunch of … people? We fight on pull requests, we fight on...

• How to force encourage developers to fix Python warnings for deprecated features

  Dec 23, 2024

  Our code is so interdependent! Adding dependencies to projects is just how code is done. Every time somebody sneezes a...

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Code Patterns

• What to do when a DB transaction fails? Retry them ♻️

  Jan 12, 2025

  What do a good portion of database transactions do? They fail. But this is hardly surprising. The whole reason we...

• Build me a global user_id / request_id / tenant_id

  Jan 3, 2025

  Sometimes you want to have a globally accessible function like get_current_user() that somehow magically stores the current user for the...

• Isolate code blocks from each other?

  Jan 1, 2025

  Aren’t we all just constantly re-creating the same bits of code? This goes beyond boilerplate code. We are adding the...

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