At the moment of the creation of the book he was working for Yahoo!, now he is with Paypal. The one thing that has not changed is that he is still a senior JavaScript architect. He is also the guy who invented JSON. The latter one is something I like - JavaScript not that much. But maybe it’s just because of my lack of knowledge.
Anyway, the idea that caught me the most is that the web is broken. It’s been built on top of a huge pile of accidents. I think the web is not the only such thing in IT. Sadly if you have a look at a hugh proportion of existing software, they are all broken. There are tons of developers out there who are either not qualified enough, not experienced enough or just simply don’t care to produce maintainable, good quality code. There are tons of webs out there.
Following upon this idea it’s not a surprise that he is not the first in the book who says that most of the things are inefficient these days. Computing power is relatively cheap and still getting cheaper and more abundant, but developers’ knowledge is far behind. People who create broken things cannot create efficient software at the same time.
I’ve stolen one of the activities of Douglas Crokcford and updated my weekly routine. I added two pomodori of “aimless” code reading. It can be corporate code, or some open source stuff on github. It doesn’t matter. It should be code unknown to me. I read code for fun, to explore other people’s ideas, their way of thinking. I started it just a week ago so it’d be early to draw the conclusion, but so far I like it. It also gives ideas how to contibute to open source code. I think it’s great, if you want to learn and also to demistify people, do the same!
