Life lessons from programming

1. Your instructions must be crystal clear, not omit any steps, and anticipate all possible scenarios.
2. If something goes awry, there’s always a logical explanation.
3. If something goes awry, it’s your fault, not that of The Cosmos.
4. You are not the victim of an irrational universe.
5. Instead, you are complicit in much of the irrationality that most directly affects you.

I was reminded of these lessons last week when creating a new username and password facility for SentenceWeaver: a tricky endeavor as I didn’t want to undermine the older first-and-last-name-based logins that my current users are using. The trickiness was exacerbated by the fact that there was some zombie code hiding in one of my files–entirely my fault, of course.