Software Development 101

Indulge me while I take a paragraph or two to get to the point.

I've worked as a Software Engineer at a lot of places now. I've stayed in some for many years, others only months; if there's not anything interesting left for me to achieve, I usually start to feel like moving on. I'd like to think this is best for everyone: I get to take my ideas and experience and give a different company the benefit of them, and my (now ex-)employer gets to bring in a new employee with a different set of ideas and experience. This cross-pollination of ideas is a part of the life of software development, but there is a balance. Keep your pool of developers too static, and you risk stagnating. Turn them over too quickly, and you'll be spending too much money on recruitment and training, and not keeping people around for long enough to see a return on that investment. Get big enough, and you can get these benefits just by letting people transfer within your company: the best of both worlds. That's not what I want to talk about, though.

I want to talk about the baseline ideas and experiences I bring to a new company. The stuff that I just want to get out of the way so I can start actually innovating.

The Hole's Too Deep! Keep Digging!

There has been a lot of rhetoric from both sides of the Australian Web Filter debate, and I can see from reading comments on stories like this one that a lot of people have bought in to many of the untruths out there. So here are some truths ("truthiness" being determined by my own views and opinions), carefully referenced to sources, so you don't just have to trust me blindly.