Diego Pacheco Tech blog

One common mistake engineers make is to test mocks. However, would you know what the right principles are and how to spot good or bad tests according to these principles?  IF you don't have first principles, you are very likely shooting into the dark.  In Brazil, we have this metaphor that if you play chess with a pigeon (I will use a chicken in this post), you will very likely lose because the pigeon does not know what it is doing and probably will be upset with you for whatever you say. People say if you truly know, you know how to explain. Well, I will go further and say IF you truly know you extract first principles and explain with those principles, so your explanation is short, concise, and direct. Otherwise, you are a chicken on a chessboard just doing random things you don't fully understand.

No. This is not a blog post about AI. However, this title could be easily confused with a famous AI paper about transformers, Attention is All You Need ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 ). Perhaps the machines know something we dont. In all seriousness, attention or focus is really a prerequisite for engineers. In order to understand complex tasks, make sense of complicated systems full of technical debt and anti-patterns, and reason on vague Jira tickets, engineers need focus. Without focus, basically, it's impossible to do engineering. Time drags you down, and what should be 1-2 days turns into weeks or even months. It's possible to get things done without really understanding what's going on. Software is about layers and layers of abstraction; nobody understands all the things in the universe. However, engineers think it's fine to move forward without solid foundations, and that's a huge mistake. IMHO, it's an attention issue. Imagine you are driving, you d...