I have a hard time explaining some of the best practices in software development, even to developers sometimes. Usually this happens when I’m trying to convey a feeling. Using words in these cases is inadequate because it lacks the emotional context that is needed to understand the message. Fear of releasing on a friday? Let’s use an example. Fear of “releasing on a friday” is common in software development. It’s not really about friday of course, but about the confidence that you have in the software you are releasing.

This week I received a notification in my LinkedIn inbox. It was an invitation to collaborate on an article, and naturally my first thought was “OMG I’m finally getting recognized for the quality of my writing!”. I clicked the link to see what exactly was being asked of me, and see what made me such a good fit for this article. Powered by AI, but how? The first thing I noticed on the page that I was taken to was a by-line under the title:

Warning: This post has nothing to do with the movie by the same title. I do highly recommend watching it though. In the short time I’ve been alive in this world I’ve gone through a handful of profound changes in perspective. The latest one has been slumbering in the background for a while. It goes to the heart of my personal productivity, or rather the lack of it. My general feeling of being unproductive is not new.

I will explain why I find the most forgotten PSR, PSR-8 is important for the community to keep in mind. In the PHP community we can debate a lot about code and anything related. If it isn’t about a new language feature then it is about frameworks or the use of finale for a class. And that isn’t bad, with honest conversations a debate can be a good learning opportunity. Not only for the people debating but also for other who are watching (or reading) the debate.

When this blog was created by @ErikaHeidi I could immediately relate to the tagline: We talk about life and stuff robots can’t understand. Now, as the lines are blurring for what robots can understand, I feel that we are even more in need of these topics. There is amazement and euphoria as we’ve created a machine that can write a credible letter to grandma for you. One that looks like you are earning your yearly Christmas gift by being thoughtful - without actually putting in the effort.

It was just another day at the office: got my coffee, opened my PHP IDE, joined some IRC channels in case I needed help with something code-related. It was my first year in Amsterdam, my first year getting involved with the PHP community. By that time, I never had been in a PHP conference before, and the only “PHPeople” I knew in real life were from the AmsterdamPHP meetup group.

Coming to WeCamp this year was a no-brainer, after my experiences last year. My write-up sparked some worry with my coach Mike van Riel (among others) because none of what I wrote about was visible at the surface. But I believe that the most important bit of the article might have been snowed under: This joy, even though I don’t mention it again, was prevalent throughout the entire week. It was the largest part of my experience there, but also the most unsurprising part of what went on.

I recently came across this excellent post from @sailorhg, titled “Coding Like a Girl”. If you didn’t read it yet, please, do it. It’s a very truthful post talking about some very common stereotypes we face, as women, working in tech. The question that started to bother me was: why are we so strongly driven by stereotypes, and how dangerous this culture is for the future of tech? The term stereotype is defined as “a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing”.

This post has much to do with the one made by Erika Heidi: The Art of Programming. She states: Respect the work of others, even if you think there is something with a similar purpose already out there. It’s their expression. They are not trying to reinvent the wheel. They are trying to create a better wheel, or a wheel that works better for their purposes. And I agree with her.

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” — Albert Einstein There is no doubt creativity is one of the most relevant and precious skills human beings can have. It greatly leverages any skill, bringing impossible things into reality. Much has been said about creativity, and yet there are so many myths surrounding it. As something that cannot be taught, only exercised, its abstraction leaves room to the idea that not everybody is capable of being creative.

One of the most consolidated misconceptions about programming, since the early days, is the idea that such activity is purely technical, completely exact in nature, like Math and Physics. Computation is exact, but programming is not. The first is a result of a machine operation, and the latter is still a human activity. Programming requires a lot of creativity, on top of the abstract concepts, tools and techniques that we might learn in a classroom; all that theory represents only a tiny portion of what is necessary to build a great developer.

The popular idiom says the truth: the devil is in the detail. Usually underestimated and considered a “second class citizen”, something superfluous, details have a lot of power. Of course, when isolated, they seem almost irrelevant; but when you look at the bigger picture, with all the little details together, they can really impact an experience - for better and for worst. Small things that bother us, although irrelevant if looked in isolation, can have a big impact in the long term.