Yes, it is a “funny” word play on the legendary sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The title of this article is something I have had in the back of my mind since very early on in my career and it has stuck with me. Note! If you are offended by swearing, bad language and grammar you will have a blast reading this article as it contains a lot of it 😂

Often times when working with developing software you get this urge to think “if it can do X, what about Y”. When thinking this you get this nice feeling inside and a sparkle in your eye. It’s the feeling of being A Proper Engineer. As the stereotype of one is that they are capable of future sight and gifted with the ability of crafting the most amazing designs up front by just Thinking Right.

I was incredibly fed up waiting for the chance to make a living writing code. Since I was very young, I’d wanted to program computers for a living. The years it took me to get there felt like an endless wait of learning things I didn’t care for. Looking back though, the learning I didn’t care for was perhaps the most valuable. Anyways…. When I finally was given a job as a programmer I was living the dream, my dream.

I realized today that my way of doing things is really quite simple, so I decided to write it down: This is my natural way of doing things. However, not everyone follow this simple three step process. It is like my current boss said: “I assume you just set off down a hill when you go skiing”. My response was: “Of course, I always do that. Don’t you?”. If you know everything about the terrain and have identified all the possible consequences, to me, you have removed all the fun.

I am fast approaching 40 years old which is pretty fucking scary in general, but even more so when you work in software. No more am I allegeable for jobs, as I’m no longer in a place where I am viewed as something for the future. These amazing and brilliant young people coming through are just so much better than I ever was. It’s a young people’s game, programming. I have many friends who are of similar age and we share a common scare.

we know that setting a deadline solves nothing we know that after a deadline, there’s someone who has to clean up afterwards we believe that workers don’t need to be bullied or pressured into performing to be successful we believe that managers who can’t make their team perform without deadlines should consider changing profession This is just some thought and I’d love your input in comments to make this better.

The first record of me interacting with a computer was a picture of me when I was three years old playing the game Pyton on a Tiki 100. I have always known what I wanted to do in life, I wanted to be a programmer and create things using computers. School was just an endless wait before I finally got to do what I wanted at the age of 19. That was when I finally got to Molde College where I could learn to program.

I’ve been wanting to create stuff on a computer ever since my dad got us our first PC back in the late eighties. Every year spent in school was one year keeping me from what I really wanted to do, program all the time. When I landed my first job at Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) I was on top of the world, programming shit for a living! I am not a very intelligent person and I’m an average coder.

what’s in a name? In my experience pretty much everything is in the name when it comes to the art of programming. If you start out with bad naming and a structure which does not communicate any of your intentions with writing the code you will end up having problems. Either understanding it yourself or having anyone else make sense of your code. When I do code reviews I often only get to this part.

A pragmatic approach means taking your surroundings into account when creating new buildings I watched this program about an architecture collective in Denmark called Adept (or something). They had “a pragmatic approach” towards architecture. What they meant was that if you where to build a new house in the midst of some ugly piece of urban sprawl you shouldn’t design something totally spaced out, but instead realize that the ugliness around you is going to be there for a while and you should take it into consideration in your project.