Retrospectively Yours: Reviewing The Past

I just finished up a letter to a programmer mentor and friend, he will no doubt think of it as way too long, but c'est la vie. It made me wonder if we don't remember the transitional steps we go through and the important ideas we coalesce into our tool-sets and where they come from.

I like to think of engineering teams as a group that picks ideas. What ideas that are picked up by the group and "internalized" is probably the most important decision made in the development group. Ideas that functionally result in a mess, can be catastrophic to an organization, and will be a millstone around the organization long after those responsible have left.

The steps in my own professional development from script-kiddie to tool-builder, have taken me to many interesting intellectual places, from standards driven development to custom extension building, but still, even after 20 years worth of programming I am not insured of making the correct decision. That is where my team comes in, during the collaborative process we all contribute to finding a decision that results in the minimum overall institutional mess, and believe you me, the decisions I arrive at myself are considerably weaker then the team decisions.

On a good team, your team mates are just your friends, and you look to your friends to help moderate your behavior and to help you make sound judgements. Also you expect to be able to help them, and to care about the various outcomes. When I look to my past in programming, I just see groups of friends, cheerfully writing code, building websites and stuffing up managers.