This one should be backdated, but I realized I didn’t really write down my thoughts about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rABwKRsec4

Sean Grove’s talk on the importance of specifications and communication is a thing that’s not a surprise to anybody, but still serves as a good reminder on its value anyway, especially when we live in GenAI being a norm and with doomposting on how AI could potentially replace developers someday and how it’s definitely not the case.

I liked that he found parallels to how lawyers and the legal system operates too. I’ve always thought before how it’d be nice if lawyers and the law itself used some form of version control and worked like programmers and quite honestly, thinking of laws and how the legal system aligns order and society is quite a close comparison to how software specs define good software projects. It also ultimately helps anchor the thought that programmers aren’t just mere code monkeys typing code all day as if that’s all what we’re paid for — the communication that goes between, and expressing the solution in the form of software and making it make sense for the end-users to solve their problems is why we’re really here, and good specifications and communication is key to solving such business problems and leading to outcomes we all want.

This video is but a fantastic mashup of all these assorted thoughts into one cohesive narrative and I really agree with it.