Engineering dogmas it's time to retire

Summary

A few months ago, I wrote about 13 software engineering laws, which are observations about how software projects behave. Today, I’ll cover 5 practices that are considered ‘common wisdom’, and why I think worth reconsidering them. Don’t reinvent the wheel - find a packageEvery PR must be reviewed 2-4 week sprints are how modern teams workEvery code change should be behind a feature flag/gateIf a comment is needed, the code is too complex Why waste time writing code that someone already wrote before you?The CTO of a startup I worked at hated dependencies. We worked with some 3D calculations (software for drones), and he was writing tens of mathematical functions himself. He insisted that even though it’s slower, he at least understands every part and can fix any bug that will pop up, and wouldn’t depend on anyone else for critical parts of our software. I used to make fun of that paranoia, and he sent me to read some crazy stories:The developer of left-pad took it down from NPM, breaking the builds of Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, and many more. It’s basically an 11-line for loop that adds spaces to a string.The is-even npm package has 160k weekly downloads(!). The author published it back when he was learning to code. Here’s what it does:You are also much more vulnerable to security incidents (and need to spend a significant amount of time chasing updates). In most smaller companies, there is no vetting process for packages (unlike for vendors) - every engineer does as they please. With LLMs, it’s easier to both get into this mess and get out of it: it’s much easier to install an unneeded dependency by mistake, but it’s also quicker to implement ‘known’ solutions from scratch.It’s a tricky balance. Another ‘common wisdom’ among software engineers is that project management software sucks. It’s a necessary evil you just have to deal with.I also thought this was just part of my job - spending hours chasing engineers to ‘keep the tickets updated’, so I could understand wh...