A Pragmatic Philosophy

This week's reading

A Pragmatic Philosophy (7 topics, ~35 pages)

• It’s Your Life
• The Cat Ate My Source Code
• Software Entropy
• Stone Soup and Boiled Frogs
• Good-Enough Software
• Your Knowledge Portfolio
• Communicate!

By the end of this week you'll be able to:

• Explain why owning the outcome ("provide options, don't make lame excuses") builds trust faster than being right
• Spot the "broken windows" in your codebase and why leaving one invites more
• Decide when software is good enough to ship, and involve users in that call
• Treat learning like an investment portfolio: regular, diversified, rebalanced
• Tailor what you say to who's listening, and listen back

Reflect & discuss

1. Name one broken window in a codebase you work on. What would it take to board it up this week?
2. Share a time from your own work where this chapter's lessons would have helped, or where you learned them the hard way.
3. What's one thing from this chapter you'll try in your own work? When you have, share how it went in #wins, and link a gist or repo if you've got one.

Put it into practice

Broken window sweep (30 min): Pick one module you touch often. List every broken window you find (dead code, ignored warnings, flaky tests, TODOs older than a year). Fix one, and file the rest where they'll be seen.

Portfolio plan (20 min): Write down one new language or tool, one book, and one community you'll engage with this quarter. Share it in the Slack thread so someone holds you to it.

Go deeper

• Topic extracts and the book's page (Pragmatic Bookshelf)
• Broken Windows theory, the criminology idea the authors borrow (Wilson & Kelling, 1982)