Three months ago I started a new job with a huge jump in responsibilities. I went from a comfortable Programmer and Occasional Scrum Master, to a panic-inducing Architect, Team Lead, and Manager. These are roles I’ve wanted for a while, so I’m happy to be here, but it’s a weird new world for me. I have a few things going for me: My boss believes in me, I’m working with a great devops guy, and my last job showed me what a sane development process looks like.

Here’s the inevitable followup to my last post about things I was right about. This is a list of things that I was convinced about when I was younger, but I now I realize I was quite wrong.

Some bloggers have strong opinions and are just right all the damn time. Like Joel Spolskey, and Jason Fried. I admire them, but I’ve never been that guy, or been that confident in my opinions. But damnit, some of my oldest opinions hold up. After nearly two decades of professional programming, I’ve looked back and thought about the opinions I originally had. Here are the ones that I’m convinced I was always right about.

The TLDR is simple: if you have a disappearing/reappearing bug, just run it again.

Programming languages can be categorized in a number of ways: imperative, applicative, logic-based, problem-oriented, etc. But they all seem to be either an “agglutination of features” or a “crystallization of style.” COBOL, PL/1, Ada, etc., belong to the first kind; LISP, APL– and Smalltalk–are the second kind. It is probably not an accident that the agglutinative languages all seem to have been instigated by committees, and the crystallization languages by a single person