I want to recommend a short free course on programming and architecture. It's so good that I've decided it's worth having a separate post about it.

• Uncommon Sense by Daniel Worthington-Bodart Some alternative views that are counter-intuitive or at least uncommon in the broader tech community. It's short but REALLY good.

Take a look at the whole curriculum:

• Just because something is compelling doesn’t mean it’s right
• Plugins are a sign of bad composability or lack of craftsmanship or both
• Libraries are overused and under understood
• Tools that haven’t had any updates in ages aren’t dead, but just finished
• Simple isn’t something you start a project with and reminisce about, it’s where you are trying to get to
• To go really really fast you need to consciously go really really slow
• It’s not about top down or bottom up, it’s about known to unknown
• When it’s hard to change something, that’s the codebase trying to talk to you, so put the pneumatic hammer away and listen
• Data structures aren’t the reserve of the CS geek, the right one will literally embody the answer to your problem
• Being a 10x developer isn’t about being 10x better or faster, it’s about doing 10x less…

The best thing is that you can watch everything in a little more than half an hour. I think around 36 minutes.

Review #

One biggest criticism of the course is how uncommon it is. I've worked in the environment and I can assure you that it works a lot better for the business and the team morale.
Unfortunately, most people are doing common sense programming. Following Sturgeon's law of "90% of everything is crap.".
I'm guilty of it myself, but I hope I got a little more skeptic with time.
To give you some examples of technologies that got popular while causing problems down the line:

• JSF
• GWT
• Java
• Angular

Not all of them in the same sense, but I draw two lessons.

1. Avoid abstractions that sound too good to be true. They probably are and dealing with a leaky abstraction is worse than working on the lower level in the first place.
2. Avoid tools promoted by big corporations. They have their own agenda.

Those are not part of the course through my example of my uncommon sense thinking and I hope we all can start sharing more of the uncommon sense ideas.

I hope you're ready to give it a try.

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