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Programming a 'Profession' part II

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an excerpt from the book "Clean Coder" Programming a 'Profession' part II for the young programmers At 11:39 am EST on January 28, 1986, just 73.124 seconds after launch and at an altitude of 48,000 feet, the Space Shuttle Challenger was torn to smithereens by the failure of the right-hand solid rocket booster (SRB). Seven brave astronauts, including high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, were lost. The expression on the face of McAuliffe’s mother as she watched the demise of her daughter nine miles overhead haunts me to this day.  The Challenger broke up because hot exhaust gasses in the failing SRB leaked out from between the segments of its hull, splashing across the body of the external fuel tank. The bottom of the main liquid hydrogen tank burst, igniting the fuel and driving the tank forward to smash into the liquid oxygen tank above it. At the same time the SRB detached from its aft strut and rotated around its forward strut. Its nose ...

Programming a 'Profession'

an excerpt from the book "Clean Coder" Programming a 'Profession'  for the young programmers You’ve picked up this book, so I assume you are a software professional. That’s good; so am I. And since I have your attention, let me tell you why I picked up this book.  It all starts a short time ago in a place not too far away. Cue the curtain, lights and camera, Charley ….  Several years ago I was working at a medium-sized corporation selling highly regulated products. You know the type; we sat in a cubicle farm in a three-story building, directors and up had private offices, and getting everyone you needed into the same room for a meeting took a week or so.  We were operating in a very competitive market when the government opened up a new product.  Suddenly we had an entirely new set of potential customers; all we had to do was to get them to buy our product. That meant we had to file by a certain deadline with the federal government, pass an asse...