A bit of a Trend

I’m seeing a bit of a trend thee days in the Blogosphere that seems to be rising quite rapidly this year.  I’m not sure if it started with the Learn to Code challenge from Codeacademy or whether it has been building for a while and I’ve only just noticed it now, but there are a lot of bloggers out there complaining about, well let’s call it The State of Programming.

They all seem to start with the premise that there is a lot of common sense that is not being used and end up with dispensing a lot of hints and tips about how to do things correctly.  These hints and tips range from:

• Keeping the code size to its smallest possible state.  Constant refactoring should allow you to reduce the complexity of the code and increase the flexibility of that same code base.
• Don’t implement things that you don’t need.  Sure embedding Twitter or Facebook into your application might seem “neat” or “cool”, but unless it provides a distinct advantage to your user, don’t do it.
• Just because an application is complex does not mean that it is good/well designed/well written/the answer to your prayers.  The best code is the simplest code.  Does it do 100% of what you think you need?  Maybe not, but I bet it does 80% of what you need at 20% of the price.
• Water-Scrum-Fall is most likely what you are doing, not pure Agile.  Don’t look at me, read the report and see if you agree.
• The tool you are using is not the reason why your project is large/cumbersome/unwieldy/poorly tested.  “It’s a poor carpenter who blames his tools”.

Now, it may be that I am sleep blogging under a whole host of names and nationalities, but I don’t think so.  I’m seeing it from older people (Nick Bradbury turned 45 in May),  people who have been in the industry for a long period of time and even on t-shirts.  Much like everything else these days it is polarizing a group of people (programmers/developers) and causing inter-personal issues and intra-team issues within organizations.

The question behind all of this is quite simple:  is the standard for programmers/developers rising or falling?  What do you think?