Rule 3 - Infrastructure, Software, and Humans

This site is a collection of essays about software engineering, infrastructure, and startups. The overall narrative is simply that things like "caring about your craft" and "attention to detail" are valuable development techniques - especially for teams, but for solo developers as well. At the same time, these aren't luxuries - putting attention in the right places is usually much more efficient than mopping things up later, and can make your efforts more predictable and less like firefighting.

Essays on Developer Process

These topics are of course intertwined and cross-referenced. Start with what interests you. The broadest subjects are

• Code Review - which often feels like distrust and bureaucracy, when it should be one of your better productivity tools, if you're doing it right.
• Testing - which deserves more attention than you're probably giving it (here are some ideas to help you correct that.)
• Release Engineering - which isn't the fringe obsessive corner it often comes across as, but is a necessary foundation for other aspects of software engineering.

For a lighter start there are articles about more specific details like

• The Bug Funnel - a structured way of justifying spending effort on quality.
• There Are No Mysteries - computers are knowable and fixable and we shouldn't pretend otherwise.

There's also a more complete structure if you want to treat this more like a book.

Background

Rule 3 itself explains the details of the rule that named this collection; it might not be the most important idea - it's really just a small corner of Code Review - it just ended up with the best name.

See Who am I to assert this for more detail on the author's own path.

See Sources for relevant books and blogs, if you want more material in this space.