Fear makes you a worse programmer

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2021-05-26 23:30:03

Does anyone have good writing about fear + programming (and how being afraid to make important changes makes you a worse programmer?)

I feel like there’s this really important line between caution (a++ excellent) and fear (which holds you back from doing necessary work)

Before I start, Ryan Kennedy linked me to this slide deck of a presentation he gave called Fear Driven Development which I absolutely loved, and I think you should look at it. I think my favorite sentence from that presentation is “Fear creates local maximums.”

I find that when I’m afraid, I become super conservative. WE CANNOT POSSIBLY MAKE THIS CHANGE WHAT IF IT BREAKS?! And this means worse software! It’s actually kind of disastrous. If you’re scared of making changes, you can’t make something dramatically better, or do that big code cleanup. Maybe you can’t even deploy the code that you already wrote and tested, because it feels too scary. You just want to stick what’s sort-of-working, even if it’s not great.

A lot of people brought up tools and processes. (in particular the fantastic Kelsey Gilmore-Innis, who has new-to-me things to say about better processes for testing code every time I talk to her)