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I'm often wrong

Developers should read Ralph Waldo Emerson. By read, I mean listen to a 30-minute podcast and claim expertise.

Emerson says being too opinionated is harmful. The cliche in tech is that the view from the window of kosher technologies shifts quickly. The result is that I've been mostly wrong about any given technical issue in my career. I'm not saying this to be unpretentious but rather a fact. 

Given I'm wrong and write poor code at a given moment is not to be interpreted that something is left permanently broken. The great thing about having loose opinions is that I'm always open to implementing a better solution. It may still ultimately be sub-par but better than the original.

Ralph Waldo Emerson says that we should not imitate others. That may not end up as a quote in a programming book, though. No one likes a genius, and a clever thinker can be an insult in a coding context. Seeing something you have seen thousands of times in your editor is usually desirable.

Widen the lens to look at your deployment setup. Which blog post was it that inspired building that? Would something not being a projection from someone else's organization chart be better? Maybe, maybe not.

Accepting that the half-life of a fact is short can lead to two paths. According to Emerson, having loose opinions can transform one's thinking toward true wisdom. If an individual is not willing to turn their coat and rather cling on to past decisions, they might become an undesirable colleague.

Source: https://www.philosophizethis.org/transcript/episode-164-transcript

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