The myth of incremental progress

During a conversation in the #gotime channel of Gopher Slack, Jerod mentioned that some people paint with a blank canvas while others paint by numbers. In this 8th episode of the maintenance series, we’re talking about maintaining our knowledge. With Jerod’s analogy and a little help from a Leslie Lamport interview, our panel discusses the myth of incremental progress.

Discussion

2022-06-04T08:12:37Z ago

So what is the difference then between a programmer and a developer? To me, the programmer is like your definition of a coder and a developer understands all of the surrounding architecture and designs and implements appropriately.

2022-06-04T17:11:10Z ago

Yeah, that’s the problem. These words often mean different things to different people, which is why I believe the distinction is silly at best and harmful at worst.

2022-06-11T11:13:15Z ago

I think you’re right here. There may even be cultural leanings here. As an English person in Australia, I may end up using slightly different terminology for the same job. Even different employers in the same areas may use different terminology for what is essentially two jobs that are the same. Even if the job that you apply for says, “Word X” to describe your job, you’ll probably end up doing a mix of everything to keep your product maintained and developed.

2022-06-07T07:03:37Z ago

It’s difficult to me to find all the maintenance series episodes.
Would you please either:

Add a #maintenance hashtag to each episode to easily find the rest of them
In each episode’s description write: “links to previous episodes in the maintenance series: …”

? 🙏

2022-06-07T14:49:55Z ago

Good call!

I went ahead and made a maintenance topic and tagged all episodes in the series with it.

2022-06-07T17:57:37Z ago

Thank you!