I am Uncluttered (Yellow): last excerpt and last chance to get the early adopter discount

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Early adopter discount has passed, but you can still buy the bundle and get all of my books at a substantial discount on the full combined price.

(And to make up for the self-promotion, a few photos at the end.)

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I am Uncluttered (Yellow) excerpt: Fear is a signal #

One of the worst things you can be, as a software developer, is fearless.

The other worst thing you can be, is terrified all the time.

(Yes, we can have two worst things at the same time. Software is just that awful an industry.)

This is particularly important in times like these where there is plenty of reason to be frightened.

In the early days of my career, I was working at a company that had a culture of constant paranoia, a hyper-awareness of all the possibilities of attacks and failures, and it resulted in a certain level of paralysis.

Admittedly, they were an anti-malware company, so they were constantly under attack, but everybody truly actually really being out to get you doesn’t make full-on paranoia any less debilitating and crippling.

The systemic paranoia left the organisation in a place where it was impossible get any web-facing project done or shipped at a reasonable pace.

Everything was walled off, separated, and made sure that nothing could break, interrupt, or expose them in any way.

Not doing anything is a valid way to stay safe, but this was not a conscious strategy on their part.

The core of the e-commerce system was built in C because their main web developer that implemented it was hyper-paranoid about the possibility of something dubious sneaking in through the back door of a scripting language.

This is at least a few steps beyond a normal level of worry and over-engineering, hopping straight over into “you’ve just made the problem massively worse” territory.

(So, “best practices”, I guess?)

This was back in the day when scripting languages were considered my many programmers to be young and immature.

Python was a new idea.

Most of the web was still being built in using Perl CGI scripts.

PHP was a relative novelty to many companies.

The developer decided to use C.

This ended up being my problem. Sucks to be me.

When I arrived, he had long since left but the company, however, was locked in this e-commerce system with a core of C that spoke to templates rendered using Perl CGI-BIN scripts. Every suggestion to change anything was met with fear that it would break everything, which was fair because they had been trying for a long while to replace it and everything did break whenever they tried to change anything.

It took close to a decade from the time they first started to try, until they successfully replaced that core system.

What replaced it was almost definitely not good – yet another poster child for “worse is better” – a mediocre hack job splicing custom, proprietary features into an open source e-commerce system (“Best practices!”).

But it was a substantial improvement over an archaic, ancient pile of C code that nobody could understand.

The opposite of paranoid fear, the utter fearlessness, is even worse for companies. Later on at the same company, after its culture had shifted a bit, one of the go-to get-things-done guys was a developer who was absolutely unafraid of anything, trying anything, implementing anything, and he would have a go at whatever, whenever, where-ever. He’d complain first, loudly, and make a bit of a show of it. Then he’d talk himself into doing it. Out loud. He was quite possibly, in a fear-laden company, the only one who always tried to get things done. (“10x developer FTW!”)

But the same issues kept cropping up. He bit off more than he could chew and even when he managed to succeed, it resulted in software that was not good, not safe, and quite hard to deal with.

Fearlessness and paranoia are both incredibly dangerous qualities in a software developer.

What you need to remember is that fear is a signal.

That’s what most emotions are – the job they do for the human psyche.

Fear is a signal you have to learn to listen to.

You have to learn to consider it a warning, not necessarily a guide, like how a compass tells you where north is. Having a compass doesn’t mean you’re obliged to always be heading north – having direction doesn’t mandate that specific direction all the time.

Knowing where danger lies, knowing what areas of your project cause you anxiety, cause you stress and worry is extraordinarily useful.

Sometimes it means you need to actually go there and try to address the problem. Sometimes it means you need to avoid it.

But without that signal, if you don’t have any fear, if you don’t have the signal that fear gives you, then you are effectively lost.

You’re going to stumble into danger.

Things will get complicated.

The same applies to being terrified all the time.

You just get locked in at home or in a single corner.

You never get anything done.

Nothing interesting gets shipped.

Ambition goes out the window.

Fear and fearlessness, the extremes are both very bad.

You need to just treat it as a signal and listen to it, but not obey it.

That C-loving software developer?

Possibly not coincidentally, he had a nervous breakdown. Last I heard he had died in a freezer-fire while working in the kitchen of a restaurant somewhere in Scandinavia. Either Sweden or Norway, I forget.

Photos #

My regular walks usually take me past the local cat shelter (it is just around the corner, after all) and there’s usually at least one inhabitant there in the window observing the outside world.

The pigeon posse was out and about in town yesterday. They were in the parking lot across from the horticultural centre Flóra (technically not a parking lot but an unassigned space that everybody has been using for parking) when I began my walk and had moved on to the Geothermal Park as I returned.

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  I am Uncluttered (Yellow): doom-prepping web dev through disdain, disrespect, and doing the right thing

  11 April 2025