Read Programming as Theory Building

I wrote a series of blog posts about this a few years ago: https://creating.software/essays/theory_of_a_program/, some of the few I ever actually finished, lol.

Most of my posts have aged terribly in the age of AI (especially the ones I didn't finish...so long, extended discussion of how to use a lab notebook when debugging, we hardly knew ye. Claude fixes our bugs now) but one job that engineers still have is the collection and retention of context that AI doesn't have and can't easily get.

The only reason I recommend this paper is because I encounter so many people that have a very myopic view of the software that they’re building. They are focused on individual features and how to quickly made them happen regardless of what happens to its cohesiveness. You start to talk about interfaces and contracts and they’re like a deer blinded by a car’s headlights.