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I had an engineering manager tell me once that every time he used the word clever to describe something he paid for it. From that moment on if I ever used that phrase or heard it my spidey sense went off. It's saved me from a lot of bad decisions.

We agree! @pragdave.bsky.social's new book is even called "simplicity". Currently in Beta pragprog.com/titles/dtcod...

9/10 times I use the word "clever" as a synonym for "there wasn't a way to do it in a way that made sense, so I had to get creative to make it work, now I gotta make it reliable"

Yeah…I’ve learned that the more impressed with how novel my solution is, the angrier I’m going to be at myself later for using a complicated solution. And it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, it’s almost always the case that simpler is better.

Unfortunately for me simple and high performance don’t always go together. Caching is hard.

My favorite exception youtu.be/p8u_k2LIZyo?...

This echoes some of the best engineers I’ve worked with 💯 Know your tools, be curious, dig into issues, help your team members, etc. There’s also a strong EQ component that underlies many of those skills—the absolute best programmers are wonderful people ime