Every developer should listen to

Hanselminutes #396
Bugs Considered Harmful with Douglas Crockford

Especially new software developers. I, too, have observed the trend Crockford mentions: The ignorance of what has come before and the whys of our industry. The obsession with Cool New Shiny and Faster-faster-faster! The latter is especially in my mind recently as I’ve been spending the last several weeks fixing bugs and otherwise cleaning up code in one of our most mission critical applications. The work was originally done by a developer focused more on completing tasks as quickly as possible than understanding and writing stable, solid code.

Crockford shares a lot more than just the title of this post. I’m not sure I’m ready to completly buy into his assertion that Javascript will lead us to the holy grail, but he makes lots of really good points worth thinking about – regardless of your age or when you started programming.