Top all-time · #815
Dan North
Personal blog · dannorth.netprogrammingcareer
Dan North's personal blog at dannorth.net covers programming and career. Since 2009, 81 different Hacker News readers have linked it 96 times, most often “Programming is not a craft”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-05-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dan North's posts on software craft, professionalism and BDD, and cite them to back up their own points.
- Recommended for · 1 comments
- One commenter says a reader would probably like the classic SOA post.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
What do you do? We help your organization go faster. What do you mean by faster? Imagine: A product manager wakes up with a great idea. He tells his manager. She sees its commercial value and works with the product manager to put a proposal together. The proposal goes into IT. If you’re lucky you mi
Most-linked posts?
- Programming is not a craft8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2011-01-11
- McKinsey Developer Productivity Review8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-10-04
- In praise of SWARMing6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-01-30
- Best Simple System for Now5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-02-03
- The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-11-13
- The Worst Programmer I Know (2023)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-08-03
- CUPID – For Joyful Coding3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-02-10
- Introducing BDD3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-04-10
- What's in a Story2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-11-05
- The perils of estimation2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-07-02
What Hacker News says?
This reminded me of a slide from a Dan North talk - perhaps this one https://dannorth.net/talks/#software-faster ? One of those anyway. The key quote was something like "You want your software to be like surgery - as little of it as possible to fix your problem". Anyway, it doesn't seem like this blog post is following that vibe.
Comment linking /talks/
on “Code like a surgeon”Submitted The Worst Programmer I Know (2023) as a story · 520 points
HN discussionAgree with this. I like some of his ideas. But a problem I have(possibly of my perception) with uncle Bob is that he gets too aggressive. If you don't have X percent (100%) code coverage, then you are doing it wrong, you are not a craftsman, etc. Well, Dan North put things in perspective a bit- https://dannorth.net/2011/01/11/programming-is-not-a-craft/ The problem is dogma. And it keeps repeating. But probably this…
Comment linking /2011/01/11/programming-is-not-a-craft/
on “Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets”Submitted CUPID – the back story as a story · 322 points
HN discussionI shouldn’t post this. It’s hard for me to single out specific patterns because it feels like the things I’m doing today (taking an idea from a written description, PowerPoint presentation or flowchart and converting it to run in an operating system with a C-based language) are the same things I was doing 25 years ago. It might be easier to identify changes. If there’s one change that stands out, it’s that we’ve gon…
Comment linking /introducing-bdd/
on “Is it really 'Complex'? Or did we just make it 'Complicated'? [video]”Submitted We need to talk about testing as a story · 126 points
HN discussion> Luckily the industry doesn’t really use this term [OOP] any more so we can ignore the changed meaning. OOP is still a widely used term today. > It used to mean “not waterfall” and now means “waterfall with a status meeting every day and an internal demo every two weeks”. That doesn't sound waterfall-y at all. > If you can hire a “DevOps engineer” to fulfil a specific role on a software team then we have all lost a…
Comment linking /introducing-bdd/
on “Phrases in computing that might need retiring”Submitted CUPID – For Joyful Coding as a story · 69 points
HN discussionI do find “BDD” a frustrating term. It was coined by Dan North [0] to refer to a coherent set of sensible TDD practices — give tests expressive names, say “behaviour” not “test”, write executable “given/when/then” acceptance criteria — but in the intervening 16 years (!) it’s mutated into… I don’t even know what. There’s a community of “BDD” practitioners who talk about all sorts of ideas that aren’t necessarily eve…
Comment linking /introducing-bdd/
on “Phrases in computing that might need retiring”Submitted The Worst Programmer as a story · 65 points
HN discussion> What do binary decision diagrams (BDDs) have to do with TDD (test driven development)? In context, BDD = Behavior Driven Development [1], not Binary Decision Diagrams. [1] http://dannorth.net/introducing-bdd/
Comment linking /introducing-bdd/
on “Bored people quit (2011)”Submitted In praise of SWARMing as a story · 45 points
HN discussionYou would probably like reading [1] by Dan North. [1]: https://dannorth.net/classic-soa/
Comment linking /classic-soa/
on “REST Anti-patterns”Submitted Programming is not a craft as a story · 33 points
HN discussionA few that I follow on a semi-regular basis: https://michaelfeathers.silvrback.com http://highscalability.com http://techblog.netflix.com http://www.natpryce.com https://8thlight.com/blog/ https://www.percona.com/blog/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com http://blog.crisp.se/author/henrikkniberg https://m.signalvnoise.com https://dannorth.net/blog/ https://codeascraft.com
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: Good tech blogs to read”Submitted Programming is not a craft as a story · 33 points
HN discussionI had seen, up until LLMs, posts in this theme: https://dannorth.net/blog/the-worst-programmer/ pretty regularly. This one was only a few years ago! Maybe we run in different circles. Or did, anyway.
Comment linking /blog/the-worst-programmer/
on “Lines of Code Got a Better Publicist”Submitted Interviewing for Evidence as a story · 23 points
HN discussionDue to the sheer volume of responses to this article the author posted a rebuttal to many complaints here: On craftsmanship http://dannorth.net/2011/01/15/on-craftsmanship/ His rebuttal is, as the author admits, better edited and more pithy. Some key parts are: "If I gave the impression that I wanted the cheapest or quickest cobbled-together solution then I certainly didn’t mean to. I want the best value software, s…
Comment linking /2011/01/15/on-craftsmanship/
on “Programming is not a craft”Submitted Best Simple System for Now as a story · 10 points
HN discussionProgramming is not a profession. "It would be great if programming were a proper profession, but it isn’t. A profession has a structured model for advancing through levels of skill and ability, be it studying for a law degree and articles (working for a legal practise) or the years of undergraduate and medical training a doctor undertakes before specialising. The latter has clearly-delineated ranks, from junior doct…
Comment linking /2011/01/11/programming-is-not-a-craft/
on “Becoming disillusioned in the programming profession – please help”Submitted The rise and rise of JavaScript as a story · 10 points
HN discussionDan North lives from speaking at conferences, corporate events and tutoring classes, so coming up with novel, memorable terms is his trade mark. I attended such a class ("software, faster" [2] or something like that) around 2016. It was very entertaining, a much needed escape from corporate reality and full of great insights and "aha" moments, but none of that had a lasting impact on me. Dan's way is to reduce compl…
Comment linking /courses/software-faster/
on “Interviewing for Evidence”Submitted Programming is not a craft as a story · 10 points
HN discussionReminds me of this post: https://dannorth.net/blog/the-worst-programmer/ Discussed here a couple of times as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37361947 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452649
Comment linking /blog/the-worst-programmer/
on “Why More Companies Are Recognizing the Benefits of Keeping Older Employees”Submitted Why every single element of SOLID is wrong as a story · 6 points
HN discussionHere's a link to this article without the anchor to the comment: http://dannorth.net/2011/12/19/the-rise-and-rise-of-javascri...
Comment linking /2011/12/19/the-rise-and-rise-of-javascript/
on “The rise and rise of JavaScript « DanNorth.net”Submitted Best Simple System for Now as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Worst Programmer I Know as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted CUPID – for joyful coding as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
