"However, when you listen to Prime, Dax, Theo, or myself give opinions, you need to remember that they're our opinions, not yours." Yes I completely agree with that. Wai-

The second part of the quote is often dropped... Strong Opinions...Loosely held. You gotta know when to alter/change your opinion. This is an undervalued strength - not a weakness. Fun faction - when interviewing a senior I like to ask a 2 part question... What technology was considered great that you thought was lousy - and you were right. And then what innovation did you hate, and then came to realize you were wrong ?

"5 years = Senior", now that's a hot take :D

Exactly the point about TDD. If you understand the requirements, TDD is simply a way of testing said understanding. If you don't understand the requirements, why the heck do you think that your tests will be accurate? Basically, TDD is a way to work out and validate requirements (IMO).

I don't think pragmatism is a problem at all. In fact, I think it's a great way to focus on the problem at hand and not get caught up in ego. Sometimes, that means iterating on a nuanced topic to figure out what a reasonable approach is for your use-case. I'll meet you halfway though: Using "it depends" as a cop-out to avoid having to make a decision, or even worse, to dodge having to admit you don't know what you're talking about in the first place, then that's a pretty bad look. That will for sure impact your performance as a developer.

I think opinions come from traumatic experiences that devs accumulate over the years. Jr devs just don't have enough production experience to be scarred by bad decisions and form opinions post hoc.

"I'm a glue engineer". Missed opportunity for, the name... is the Gluagen!

"Frontend, backend, mobile, embedded, etc." Wow, that's an extremely big "etc."! I would definitely put mainframe and HPC as two completely different categories there. High assurance software, like in aerospace, is probably a completely different ballgame also.

I have opinions. One being that developers spend a lot of time arguing about crap that doesn't actually matter. Sometimes it feels like people are searching for a silver bullet. There isn't one. It's tradeoffs all the way down.

My first job was working on test infrastructure of mission critical software and TDD is actually great, once you have it set up, which is a pain. When you have a bug, you create a test that is guaranteed to reproduce the issue, then you modify the code until the test passes, then you run it through every single test to verify there are no changes. We were legally required to do so, but it made development very easy. Switching to a startup web company, it is shocking to see how little test coverage there is and how frequently things are broken. Granted the first situation was a offline program and didn't deal with dozens of microservices so I get how that can be harder to get right, but I get so much stress from deploying something now and holding my breath hoping it doesn't break anything because we have little testing. I'd much prefer the guardrails of a TDD environment

I just want to appreciate the fact that the time length of this video is 13:37 😂

This video hurt me. Thanks! Nice to see I'm not completely numb to searing burns.

That article is a goldmine of ideas and opinions. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

1:16 Oh boy. Right of the bat, I have to disagree. The more experience you get, the more nuances you're exposed to, & the more your answers start with, "It depends."

Pair programming is not fun but quite effective. Only in moderation because it is also quite exhausting. And the rest too, nice takes 😀

I had opinions after university, and as a professional my opinions keep getting validated. I have no idea where tf people find juniors that know nothing.

my brief time in programming has taught me that when you strip away all the opinions and subjectivity, only a few raw truths remain: 1. every language is ass, especially the one youre using right now 2. every project built with those languages is therefore also ass 3. likewise, anyone who calls your language/project ass is an ass 4. there are no right answers, just answers that are less ass than others

I love Prime. He gives me my daily dose of assumption challenges. But I'm qualified to comment on TDD and if TDD isn't working for you when you don't understand the problem then you're doing it wrong. TDD is a method of rapidly iterating on the pronlem domain and the whole point is for the dev to learn about the domain context.

We use a fair amount of Haskell at my job. Just don't use it for something that requires insane throughput.

This is so true. It's very cringe to see juniors having strong negative opinions about something they are yet to experience or understand.

"When I really understand the problem TDD is fine, but when you don't understand the problem TDD is godawful." You've expressed this several times recently in different ways. You also recently said that you like prototyping, ie, you experiment to understand the problem then you throw it away and start fresh (bravo, btw, hardly anyone actually does this). What you're missing is that there is nothing about TDD that says you can't do this. As much as I HATE how Uncle Bob generally expresses himself on this, he does say it best with: "Don't write a line of **PRODUCTION** code without a test." You are absolutely free to prototype and experiment to understand the problem. Agile even has a term for this: a "spike" (from "to drive a spike through the problem"). At the risk of sounding like I'm trying to give you an old "gotcha" here, if you've prototyped and experimented then now you are in a position to use TDD in that same way you did that one time that you said it was great: armed with a good understanding of the problem! This is what TDD was meant to be and still is to many people. It helps tease apart a more technical design-you'll uncover lower level problems like where to draw boundaries, how easy you API is to use in isolation, and when functions are maybe doing a little too much (beware of many single-line/single-user private functions, though, those are pure evil). There is nothing in the source material that says TDD was ever about designing a complex system from the first key-stroke.

It's so funny to hear Prime saying "that's the greatest take of all time" in every single video. lol

I am a grown ass man and i just went out loud. I want to be a glue engineer. Glue engineer. GLUE ENGINEER...

The pragmatist has a place when you are asking generalized questions. There is no one right way to do a thing and different clients can have different requirements which lead to different optimal solutions. Having a single dogma that doesn't work for your client won't end well... but that's the difference with being on a singular team with a single product versus a consultant working on tons of different products and platforms with different dev teams.

I only done SCRUM once for real and it was awesome. I think people take it too seriously. If you do "chill SCRUM" things are pretty nice. I think the key for my team was that each role was an engineer in the team doing real coding work. If you made things bad for the coders you made it bad for yourself. I guess it might be more agile than SCRUM, esp. since we allow heavy modification of SCRUM principles, basically Retrospectives rule everything. Hate that annoying meeting? Alright let's remove it!

In my mind I always think, "I love TDD! How else could I rest easily knowing for sure everyhting works?" but hearing people complain about being forced to do it I realize my TDD practice is very loose. Typically I write a bunch of code to roughly put all the pieces in place-- somewhere between functioning code and pseudo code; I know it won't work as-is but it more or less serves as a blueprint. Then write a bunch of tests based on these components--which I know are full of bugs and typos and don't work yet--and then keep iterating until the tests pass. TDD super-lite?

2:04 After 40 years I started to become a bit selective on which topics to have strong opinions on and not, I have my prejudice, and my preferences, yet I also have my curiosity wondering what other people may come up with. Why mongo when there are FileMaker ERD, PostgreSQL performance, and elastic search DSL?

Theo mentioned

"I don't like Scam Bait" Me watching Kitboga in another tab: "Sorry, Prime says you have to go.."

Lane is the goat, his go course on top tier

Pragmatists DO have opinions, but I tend to agree with you, I'd rather deal with folks who have opinions based on their own experiences (even if I don't agree with them) rather than deal with the opposite.

what you'd call a "glue engineer", we'd call a "floater"

As a person who has never programmed in Haskell in his entire life, I do, still have a reason to hate it. I use Arch btw :), and whenever I let even a small haskell program onto my machine, it immediately comes with 300 MB of dependencies spread across 40 different packages (I'm looking at you, shellcheck) and my list of updates becomes so long to read because it's a wall of Haskell packages. I hate Haskell strictly because of it's dependency management. It's the same reason I hate PHP (at least it's less disk space, but still includes the update wall of text) and to a lesser extent (smaller wall and less disk space) Python. At least Node, Go and Rust have the decency to have independent package management that doesn't interfere with my OS upgrades. Go and Rust is even better in this respect because if the Go or Rust developer give you a pre-built binary, then you have to install zero Go and Rust dependencies, including the compiler itself. So, as a non-Haskell dev I can definitely say, I hate Haskell.

Almost everyone saying they do Scrum is doing NotScrum. I got a chance to do Scrum one time and it was wonderful. However, there is zero chance you will get to work with a team and leadership that cares to understand it or the courage to attempt it. So in practice, yea, avoid scrum at all costs. Just get a kanban board up and pretend to update the ticket here and there.

There was so much crap I learned as a junior dev that everyone is now realising was total crap; what are you supposed to do when you can't trust your community, peers, elders to lead you in a healthy direction? Forget coding, that, sadly, seems true of the world today.

I've never actually done TDD outside of an interview, but I could intuitive know that TDD's usefullness is 100% correlated to how deterministic the problem is. I mostly work on research/experimental projects so TDD is virtually impossible on those.

As a Senior Developer of 11+ years, My opinion is that some people who have strong opinions are just too opinionated. IMO.... 🤣🤣

Point 2 was definitely me when I started out and BOY was I annoying AF. Leveling up involved a lot of learning how ignorant I was, and embracing that, building up a foundation for opinions (usually by _learning_ from screwing up) instead of holding unfounded opinions.

I disagree with a lot of your opinion. But here I am watching and liking your videos.

That Haskell joke was next level

I personally decide whether do TDD or not using bottleneck-first approach (or let's start writing the most difficult and uncertain parts first approach). When I have no image of implementation, I write codes first. When I feel debugging or testing is more difficult than writing codes (for examples when it involves external API calls or complicated data setup) I write test codes first.

Who's Dax?

We would be remiss if we did not note that there is a difference between not having an opinion and being so jaded that you don't care to form opinions.

What an honorable man you are! My most high respect to you Mister Prime!

Tfw I was an htmx advocate for way over a year before Prime got into it, but now everyone thinks I'm just fanboying and pushing his opinions ;_;

I havent laughed so much on any channel, ever. thank you

So I have tried htmx. Loved it. And I did a little bit of heresy. I added JSX so now I can use JSX with htmx and that's awesome and even my colleges loves it. If it looks like react 😂

Doesn't even take a year to workout using mongodb was a bad idea.

That is a great article. Junior devs (like me) gotta remember that our field of vision as to what "is good" and "is bad" is really short and really narrow. Our opinion is going to be based on limited relative knowledge, and Seniors are going to have a large amount of "footgun" experiences that crafted their opinion. It might be that HTMX and Go are amazing and React+Node is going to rot the brains of the youthful CS grads. But I don't know HTMX and Go. I know how to make some React Server Components "do the thing" for grandma's family picture website. So, of course it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's what I know, and I haven't had my footgun experience (yet). :P

Clickbait originally meant what you are describing as scam bait. You click because of the bait and they don't deliver any content they advertised.

1:49 pragmatism isn’t avoiding unpopular opinions or decisions. It’s making sensible real-world achievable choices rather than the theoretically best choices.

What's a TIDDY?

Cult people always say you will face hell if you don't subscribe to their beliefs. Agile/Scrum is one hell of a cult.

@4:00 i thought he was going to say "the talks so much shit he make me wonder if i also do"

Embedded programming realities: 1) What is that C "standard" you are talking about? You mean that C-dialect that was implemented by Jack the employee at Microchip Inc in the basement of his apartment in 1994 and throws errors when you create a variable name with more than 10 letters? 2) Do you know what happens when your callstack grows into your heap? 3) Do you know how much memory is left when you call ONE callback on a microcontroller with 20 BYTES of memory? Fun fun fun... I could think of a few more things...

THIS. EVERYBODY NEEDS TO READ THIS.

A little bit confused about what the author means by "[used it] in a real project". Does that mean I can say that I hate react if I rebuild my portfolio in it?

I like the idea of TDD as this first line defence against bad code, but after a few tries I decided to just leave it alone. For prototyping and especially UI - especially especially UI built with frameworks - it feels like an additional and completely unnecessary work.

what's wrong with mongo and what is the alternative that fixes that issues without creating other issues ??

But WHY do Scrum suck, and whats the alternative? I'm still a junior and has been questioned about the role as scrum master, and I feel like that could lead into me changing stuff. I hate daily standup that gives nothing, but everyone seems to just be on board with it. WHATS A GOOD ALTERNATIVE? Please help.

I don't have strong opinions about anything, as I have been able to understand any given tech and complete all given tasks with them. As long as it works, I'm happy. ...or maybe it is the fact that I have done almost exclusively frontend.

2:10 honestly, i do not have an opinion on that

We need a HTML/HTMX tag

Having worked scrum and kanban as a remote developer one thing I liked about scrum was it’s more of a community. Working kanban there is no downtime, no reset, no goal, just continuous work

I dunno, I've pissed off a lot of people saying "It depends..."

This one blog has enough good words for two months of tweets

lol! Did you really think we wouldn't notice you pulled the outro from another video???

If the frontend looks that old, you know the backend knowledge is solid.

Kitboga & Prime collab when?

As a junior dev, I have lots of opinions. Mostly they're opinions about how I hate everything I'm trying to do because whatever it is I'm trying to do, no matter what it is, is probably the wrong thing. How do I have rawaccel on Linux? IDK, I'm beginning to think that trying to have mouse accel in the first place is the wrong thing.

If two equally good things are being discussed, does it make sense to even have an opinion? I like to reserve opinions for when it actually matters and something really bad is on the table - otherwise you end up bike shedding and in endless discussions. Not having a strong opinion on everything gives your opinions more importance when you actually need to speak up

Who is Dax? What is name of his YT channel?

I hate being an elitist, butI just ignore what people have to say about TDD if they never read Kent Beck's book on it.

And here I am learning scrum in my company 😢

The glueagen

Where's the part about Todd??

Are we talking about senior developers or people with 5 years experience? :D I absolutely have an opinion what is considered "senior" these days

It's just that so many people have bad opinions that are short-sighted and narrow-minded, they have never considered that something they don't like might have perfectly good reasons to exist and they're just trying to use the wrong thing because they have no idea what they're doing. Personally I just dislike people who don't bother or can't even reason their opinions. The opinions are worth nothing to me if they can't communicate it, they might just as well be talking untrue baseless trash. And a lot of people take offense in having to actually explain their opinions and reasoning, as if they weren't the pope with unquestionable truths. Good opinions, great talkers and educators never fit in a tweet. Even though it's a demonstration of knowledge and skill to compact the message, soem messages are too valuable to fit in a tweet.

To be honest I do not get why so many people hate scrum so passionately. Maybe I just haven't been in a project where other development modes worked well. The scrum projects I have been in worked better than the non-scrum projects I have been in.

when you don't understand the problem TDD is straight up a blocker

Thumbs up for mentioning Kitboga…

i wrote an article on medium about lack of empathy in software engineering called Clean Architecture is a Mental Disfunction. Prime, are you too big to look at it?

"Don't do clickbait?" Bruh my entire life is a giant clickbait.

New is always great for Tech KZfaqrs.

do u have ur own team at netflix. id love to work on your team because I hate TDD as well. usually the people pushing it dont actually coded and think it sounds good on paper.

love the transparency of your sponsorship, because some other creators mentioned in the article is not.

who is dax? can someone link me

I was in a great project run in Scrum once. Skill issue

My hot take is unless you're working on a giant application over many years with many programmers -- writing tests is a waste of time.

I am gay and I have noticed people with the same sexuality as mine tend to love react, nextjs and idolize Theo😅. But straight men seem to like htmx and Prime more. Also noticed that people commenting on Primes twitch channel or also way way more smarter than Theos.

Ayyy mobile shout out 5:46

While I enjoy your and Theo's content, agree on quite a few things, and disagree with at least equal amount I've still always gained something from the videos, like taking a look at HTMX and now start to slowly but steadily lose my hate towards HTML templating, moving more stuff to server... And yeah, I did get a job in web dev thanks to React as it felt least annoying framework to work with if you wanted to get a job few years ago.

I have to admit my opinions still are copy pasta of other people's opinions, especially Robert Martin's, and Prime's before that. Eventually though you observe that these people have richer opinions than they make it look like they do and you go "oh... Oh so there's no escape... How are we going to manage. Life is so complicated. I thought I had the answers!" But when I do have opinions based on experience it feels awesome. Nothing hurts anymore!

0:59, no fun? It's awesome! 10:33, I watched a presentation in which some dude said his team failed badly with Haskell. And if we add to that the Haskell motto, _"Fail at all cost!"_ , we can assume many had tried... and failed badly! I can imagine why: there's an obsession about pure f()s. The real world needs don't embrace that, most of the time. So 1 has to update variables outside the already precarious encapsulation of a f(), to fulfill the side-effect needs, so avoided by the language. Thus, everything becomes periculous. The disaster is just a matter of time. 12:50, what does that mean? Once you used htmx, you just use it, without an opinion? The perfect pragmatic tool?

1337 He did it

Since when being pragmatic has anything to do with having opinions.

Anyone that starts an argument with “you’re not qualified” should be immediately disregarded out of hand.

anyone tried ferretdb ?

Why does Prime not like nosql?)

Using SCRUM in my current project, i feel 50% slower