Technology Cafe

If I were to summarize my experience in Software development, that I have gathered over the last 10 years or so, it would be more of a collection of “Don’t do that” rather than “Do that”.

In other words, I have learned more from doing things incorrectly rather than doing correctly. Why? I guess simply because the affects of mistakes stick for a longer time than the benefits you get from doing things the right way.

I may not know the best way to get to New york from Boston. But i can tell you what highways to avoid and what the rush hours are…

So today, I want to “confess” three mistakes that I did and the valuable lessons that I learned from them.

1) Don’t stop listening when you tell.

This was very early in my career, I was young and restless. At that time I was working on the authorization module of a Swing based CORBA client. Roughly put, it worked as follows: Users had permission to either read or create or modify information. Our trick was to have a semantics based naming convention for the button variables. Then using reflection, the buttons would get disabled, thus denying access to parts of the application
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