The Pessimistic Software Engineer
Usually, when we set out to build software, we work from a specification or Product Requirements Document (PRD), which outlines how the software should function from a user’s perspective. This focuses us on the horizon of end-user functionality, and from there, we start working backward, filling in the gaps and building a model of how all of the pieces fit together to deliver this functionality. This might involve database reads, writes, API calls, validation, etc. If all of these steps go well, the user gets what they want, and the application meets its goal. But how many opportunities are there for failure along the way? How many known failures could there be, and perhaps more scarily, how many unknown failures could there be waiting to trip us up? The Pessimistic Software Engineer doesn’t just assume things will probably be okay, but actively assumes things will break, in every way possible, at some point in the future. ...