DeveloperWeek 2020

You may have heard the one about a young couple who found a hook in their car door, or the girl who always wore a green ribbon around her neck. But what about the starry eyed dev who tried to build a harmless looking text parser for the command line? They ended up breaking Qt system wide! How about the little side scrolling Python game that requires you to configure and build Tcl from source??

Many of us will have shared spooky stories and been an audience for them ourselves, delighting in the chills we get or the reactions of the people around us. But is there anything we can take away from them? If the subjects of these stories could go back in time, would they do anything differently? Are these really cautionary tales that we should be heeding?

I believe the future of developer tooling is products that will vanquish our developer specific horrors, by learning from the past. They’re not a swath of net new, they are finally doing something we’ve been doing wrong, right. For me and my colleagues, that ‘something’ is building software with complicated and difficult to resolve dependencies.