Games industry veteran Mike Acton gave talk/rant at Game Developers’ Conference (GDC) 2019 where he listed 50 things he expects of developers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV5HArLYajE This list was transcribed by Adam Johnson and posted here: https://adamj.eu/tech/2022/06/17/mike-actons-expectations-of-professional-software-engineers/ and I am copying it here for posterity.

I found this list useful as reference material; some of the items on this list do not apply to my job because I rarely do anything especially performance-oriented nowadays, and some of the items on the list are good to always have in mind but subject to the programmer’s own judgement, on a case by case basis, whether they should be practiced or not.

Here it is:

This post is intended as support material for another post of mine; see Towards Authoritative Software Design.

One day back in the early nineties, when people were using Windows 3.0 and the Microsoft C/C++ Compiler, a colleague showed me a software design that for the first time he had done not on whiteboard, nor on paper, but on a computer screen, using a new drawing tool called Visio.

This post is intended as support material for another post of mine; see Towards Authoritative Software Design.

The idea of creating software using visual tools has existed ever since the first aspiring programmer was bitterly disillusioned by discovering that programming almost exclusively entails writing lots of little text files containing nothing but boring and cryptic text.

This post is intended as support material for another post of mine; see Towards Authoritative Software Design.

The Universal Modeling Language (UML) (Wikipedia) was intended to be a standard notation for expressing software designs, and to replace the multitude of ad-hoc notations that software architects have been using on various mediums such as whiteboard, paper, and general-purpose box-and-arrow diagram-drawing software. The idea was that by following a standard notation which prescribes a specific way of expressing each concept, every diagram would be readily and unambiguously understood by everyone.

It has miserably failed.

The origins of the debate go so far back that they are lost in the mists of time, but a good starting point (which contains references to prior debate) is an Internet Draft from 2018 titled Terminology, Power, and Inclusive Language in Internet-Drafts and RFCs. Some especially woke communities like the Python community had already started applying some of the recommendations in this draft as early as 2019, but things really picked up steam in 2020, with the murder of George Floyd.

I knew I was definitely going to watch this one, from just the title. It turns out that he comes across a bit annoying due to attitude; nonetheless, the talk is definitely worth watching.