It's a principled craft
The principles behind maintainable software are well-documented, but scattered across books, talks, and the occasional good team. What you pick up depends on where you end up and how much you seek out on your own. This site is an attempt to organise my own thoughts on the subject, as well as bring some of these principles together.
I started my career with no formal training, just experience tinkering with websites and Arduino projects. My first job at a consulting firm as a Test Automation Engineer was formative. I was trained well in testing fundamentals, set up my first CI/CD pipeline, and saw first-hand how applying tested principles made a real difference. Approaching my work that way has felt like second nature ever since.
In subsequent roles I was often surprised at how little of that structure existed elsewhere. Yet other times I found teams where purposeful engineering was ingrained in everything they did. That’s when I realised that years of experience are no guarantee you’ll be trained well; it depends on where you end up, who you work with, and how much you seek out on your own.
Other disciplines like medicine or aviation have developed widely accepted standards over time, and you are taught these principles as you gain experience. Software engineering is still catching up, even though the world increasingly depends on the software we write.
Without that kind of structured training, I had to piece it together myself. Early on, I often looked at code and felt something was off, but lacked the vocabulary to articulate why. So I started reading, watching conference talks, and collecting principles I could apply in my work. Sometimes I found colleagues who showed me the underlying ideas, and I’m grateful to them for sharing their knowledge.
There’s a lot out there on these topics, scattered across books, articles, talks, and forums. That’s what led me to start this site: a way to organise my own thinking. While it’s primarily for myself, I hope some of you find it useful too.