This is written more like a puff piece for a resume than an actual substantive article. I've been a professional developer for a long time and the real solution is "all things with a grain of salt".
> So if you never assume that you might have blown things up, you will start blaming other things – your peers, the stupid framework you are using, an outdated browser or a pre-historic OS. Anything will be responsible but you. And if you never admit your mistakes, you are cursed to never evolve. And not evolving as a developer is fatal.
If your test suite is comprehensive I've found it's often the case there's some external variable outside of your control that wasn't accounted for. This may or may not be a bug and may or may not need to be accounted for. Sometimes it's as simple as "upgrade your browser" or "we don't support that input, that is why you get an exception". Just as this person seems keen to blame the developer, it's often the user who blames the developer for their own shortcomings.
> If you lose track of this, you have become a bureaucrat. And well, it’s pretty hard for a bureaucrat to be a good developer.
98% of my job as a senior IC is bureaucratic nonsense. No one cares what code I write. No one cares about elegance. They care about a solution on time, and most importantly on budget. This is a failing of nu-agile where engineers are micromanaged to death by "certified PMs".
> But even if you don’t, you are halfway through to the solution and a fresh pair of eyes will be much more effective in the process of helping you.
"Be assertive" is such a poor way of saying "use rubberduck debugging". Especially in the context of writing code.
> Take pleasure in writing more code
There have been many times I've gone out of my way to make my code more verbose (within reason) to increase clarity for my juniors. I don't do this as a habit but again "all things with a grain of salt".
> It’s pretty clear that your workload is proportional to the amount of code.
This is so untrue I don't even know where to start. I can make a counter example 10 line function that needs 30 tests. In fact, a lot of real algorithms are this way. Going by line count/test ratio is a bad developer habit and this guy is coming off like a bad developer.
> Think about what makes a text enjoyable to you. It is usually concise, clear, direct, meaningful and consistent. You won’t enjoy reading when you can’t understand the author
This sentence is wildly ambiguous. On one hand the author advocates writing clear, meaningful, and concise code, and on the other hand they advocate (by omission) being as verbose as possible all the time. I make frequent use of higher order functions to stop cluttering my code with simple loops for sums, operations over a list, etc. Would the author consider me a bad developer because not everyone understands these simple constructs?
> I hope that you find the above rules useful in your quest of becoming a bad developer. But if you ever change your mind and decide to grow into a good one instead, well, you now know what you need to avoid.
Ah, hell hath no fury like the hubris of a bad developer telling other developers how to be good.
> So if you never assume that you might have blown things up, you will start blaming other things – your peers, the stupid framework you are using, an outdated browser or a pre-historic OS. Anything will be responsible but you. And if you never admit your mistakes, you are cursed to never evolve. And not evolving as a developer is fatal.
If your test suite is comprehensive I've found it's often the case there's some external variable outside of your control that wasn't accounted for. This may or may not be a bug and may or may not need to be accounted for. Sometimes it's as simple as "upgrade your browser" or "we don't support that input, that is why you get an exception". Just as this person seems keen to blame the developer, it's often the user who blames the developer for their own shortcomings.
> If you lose track of this, you have become a bureaucrat. And well, it’s pretty hard for a bureaucrat to be a good developer.
98% of my job as a senior IC is bureaucratic nonsense. No one cares what code I write. No one cares about elegance. They care about a solution on time, and most importantly on budget. This is a failing of nu-agile where engineers are micromanaged to death by "certified PMs".
> But even if you don’t, you are halfway through to the solution and a fresh pair of eyes will be much more effective in the process of helping you.
"Be assertive" is such a poor way of saying "use rubberduck debugging". Especially in the context of writing code.
> Take pleasure in writing more code
There have been many times I've gone out of my way to make my code more verbose (within reason) to increase clarity for my juniors. I don't do this as a habit but again "all things with a grain of salt".
> It’s pretty clear that your workload is proportional to the amount of code.
This is so untrue I don't even know where to start. I can make a counter example 10 line function that needs 30 tests. In fact, a lot of real algorithms are this way. Going by line count/test ratio is a bad developer habit and this guy is coming off like a bad developer.
> Think about what makes a text enjoyable to you. It is usually concise, clear, direct, meaningful and consistent. You won’t enjoy reading when you can’t understand the author
This sentence is wildly ambiguous. On one hand the author advocates writing clear, meaningful, and concise code, and on the other hand they advocate (by omission) being as verbose as possible all the time. I make frequent use of higher order functions to stop cluttering my code with simple loops for sums, operations over a list, etc. Would the author consider me a bad developer because not everyone understands these simple constructs?
> I hope that you find the above rules useful in your quest of becoming a bad developer. But if you ever change your mind and decide to grow into a good one instead, well, you now know what you need to avoid.
Ah, hell hath no fury like the hubris of a bad developer telling other developers how to be good.