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@dhinrichs-scottlogic dhinrichs-scottlogic commented Jan 19, 2026

Please add a direct link to your post here:

https://dhinrichs-scottlogic.github.io/blog/2026/01/19/three-year-reflection.html

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I think it's really good, I've just made a couple of grammatical notes and a couple of suggestions

## Names
Solid naming conventions make a huge difference. A branch named “ticket-42-add-intergalactic-microservice” is far better than simply “42”. A commit message “ticket 42: added controller” is easier to work with than “made changes”.

And when you work with users, product owners, testers, and other teams, making sure that we all know that we are talking about the same thing becomes absolutely necessary for making progress. Consistency is vital, and I wouldn’t shy away from adding definitions into the README or add an intranet page explaining the terminology different teams use. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter if we call it a spaceship_id, ship-key, or transportIdentifier, as long as we use whichever word we pick consistently in our code and conversations.
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Personally I think it's about using naming styles and naming conventions consistently rather than individual words

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it's a bit of both. I've been in meetings where it takes 20 minutes before everyone understands what exactly we're talking about because everyone uses the same word but talks about a different thing....
But the examples I gave definitely are more about naming conventions for sure.
I've replaced "whichever word we pick" with "whichever naming styles and naming conventions we pick", is that sufficient or should I rework this section differently?

Speaking of conversations – let’s talk about people next.

## People
When I first started to learn coding someone told me: “In software development, all problems that aren’t math problems are people problems”. After three years I think I’m starting to get an idea of what they meant.
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In British English this should be "maths problems" instead of "math problems"


I could tell you about cognitive load and how a visually clear structure reduces it, or about the effort of reviewing a PR with multiple typos in it, but I think you already get the point.

It takes a small effort to add the correct settings and configurations to your IDE/pipeline checks, but it will save you a huge amount of energy and time in the long run.
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You could also mention how a lot of linting tools can semi-automatically fix your formatting too. I think it's good you didn't refer to the process as "linting", that is a bit too jargony

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I just added it in as an additional point in the section above, but not sure if that is what you had in mind?


That’s a wrap for 3 years of coding.

Can't wait to see what the next few years will teach me.
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I'd prefer it if this said "I can't wait to see [...]"

@csalt-scottlogic csalt-scottlogic merged commit 53a5512 into ScottLogic:gh-pages Jan 20, 2026
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