Code Like You Don’t Own It

Five Reasons to Avoid Being a Territorial Programmer

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I have written computer programs for over forty years. Like many developers, my initial programming efforts were unpaid, single-person affairs. In my case, things that were written as a teen in the late 1970s and early 1980s in BASIC and assembler for primitive mainframes and early home PCs.

In my early career, I was a hardware engineer. I started writing programs then while “on the clock”. These were mainly small, utilitarian scripts to get specific jobs done relating to the hardware I was designing. I was usually the sole developer and user of these programs, but occasionally I would write something useful enough to share with others. This is where I learned the pride and satisfaction of creating some piece of software that had value to others — something I still value and seek to this day.

Later when I shifted careers to work as a software developer, one of the first things I had to adapt to was how to work on code with other people. There was a lot to learn here. Things like planning software architecture instead of just hacking it to life, working with people who had different ideas, and all the specifics of making contributions to a larger software system that multiple developers worked on.