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.

25 years ago, a simple question was asked about storage, access times, and economics, and the result was a simple paper. Every ten-ish years since then, an updated paper was written to answer the same question. It’s not a terribly good measure of complexity, but it is enlightening.

Mark Richards runs the Developer to Architect website, and puts out a video every Monday. He has helpfully categorized them. I watched all the videos in the “Soft Skills” category and took notes.

I’ve been reading about failures in distributed computing. A lot of it is thanks to Vaidehi Joshii’s Year of Distributed Computing at https://medium.com/@vaidehijoshi . Here’s small summary of what I’ve learned.