[vlovich123]

I don't think I've come across coursework that's intended to level up coding ability itself (i.e. good software engineering/design) rather than teaching basic knowledge things. I'm curious if anyone has come across anything of that nature.

[0xdeadbeefbabe]

I've come across the book Clean Code, which presumes to improve your craftsmanship. It has been improving craftsmanship for 12 years, and everyone has noticed of course.

Have you seen a shortage in people who dress up their preferences as facts? Maybe a better question is, who is producing the good software? Oh, and software ought to include malware (personal preference).

[vlovich123]

I don't know, but some of the people I consider to be really good software developers seem to reference "The Pragmatic Programmer" (perhaps even more than I realize do since I never read the book but have heard of "rubber duck debugging" & "DRY").

Generally, good software would have to be first defined and there's no universal definition. In most projects, I require it to have the following properties: * New developers find it easy to ramp up on * A handle on the defect rate (usually through adoption of best-practices like unit tests, fuzzers, automated tools, CI/CD, reproducible builds, etc). * "Fires" infrequently enough relative to team size that it's manageable to accomplish your business goals. * No "surprises" in adding new features/fix bugs where you didn't expect them. * Meets business requirements today & can meet them tomorrow.

However, in other cases, like prototyping, "good software" means, "explores the problem space as quickly & cheaply as possible without worrying about any of those other things". Some of those other things can be useful in accomplishing this, especially if you plan to pivot from prototyping to the above definition. If you don't use them effectively then throw away your prototype before productionizing & start from scratch.

[jkhdigital]

For me this knowledge has always come from working on a variety of projects and seeing the effects of various architectural and design decisions on the result. Hard to imagine how such things could be taught otherwise, honestly.