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Discussion on: Which contentious opinions in programming actually matter?

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Ricardo Bánffy • Edited

As someone coming from both software engineering and operations, I place great value on having an intimate understanding of the actual environment your applications will run. Knowing well the ins and outs of your runtime kernel, of the low-level libraries you use and being able to anticipate issues that can arise from your persistence layer (be it a filesystem or a database) is extremely important.

Having said that, I'll go on a limb and bring up the Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux divide and suggest you should use the platforms your code will run as much as you can. If you program Windows desktop apps, nothing will substitute your hands-on experience with Windows and other Windows apps for making applications that seamlessly integrate with the environment. Same goes for Macs and Linux. Making a GUI app to manage services will make a lot of sense on Windows and absolutely none on Linux. If your code is deployed on Linux, nothing will help you more to understand your monitoring and operations than using a Linux machine every day.