The best – and I think the only – way to discover what good code looks like is to work with it.
Eventually, after working on, say, half a dozen code bases, you'll start to understand intuitively what good code is, providing you get lucky enough to find a good code base, or a code base with a significant amount of good code.
It's a long old journey, but once you have the skill, it never goes away. It's like learning a musical instrument or a foreign language. (By which I mean you can read as many books as you like about it, but without application, you haven't yet begun. Nevertheless, read the books.)
Warning: most developers never attain this skill, but almost all of them believe – truly believe – that they write good code; just as everyone thinks they are a good – nay excellent – driver.
Warning: no one writes good code. Good code becomes good through iteration, just as good writing becomes good by iteration/editing. The reason for this is obvious; but if you don't know why, then you haven't done enough yet.
Warning: everyone has biases. Learn to recognise yours and when you are applying them. Learn to ignore them and see things through a different lens. Explore with an open mind.
Iterating to good code is one of the most satisfying things you can do with software development.
There's a real world example of this situation from the six-month Irish bank strike of 1970. Cheques, pubs, and trust ultimately replaced the banking system; and everything kept moving; not perfectly, of course, but neither are our current systems.
A couple of links to get you going, but there's a lot of data out there on this:
I have two Apple machines. One is old and stuck on Catalina – three iterations behind the current macOS [Catalina -> Big Sur -> Monterey -> Ventura] – so for a long while I kept both on Catalina to avoid issues. Sadly, the older machine died a few weeks ago, so I decided to update the other machine to Monterey (because Ventura is still in the teething-troubles phase).
Now I get about 9 Mbps here, so I started the upgrade before bed, and left it overnight to do its thing. Next day I was presented with the garish boot Monterey boot-screen and logged in.
That’s it. This is a boring story.
There were a few small cosmetic differences, but otherwise everything was just as it was before. No clicks required. No dark patterns. Dare I say: it just worked.
There’s no reason Microsoft, or any other company, can’t do this. It’s simply respecting the user/customer.
I left the Microsoft universe about a decade ago simply because it felt too stressful. Nothing was concrete. It felt like the sand was always shifting beneath you. I have no love of Apple – I’ll move if they start playing games – but for now, they do most things – far from everything – well, and I never feel disrespected, even if my wallet is somewhat lighter every now and then.
And Johnny Rotten: “Ever Get the Feeling You've Been Cheated?”
J.G, Ballard talked about it a lot. See his interviews in Extreme Metaphors, rather than his novels.
“I feel that the 1960s represent a marked turning point. For the first time, with the end of the Cold War, I suppose, for the first time the outside world, so-called reality, is now almost completely a fiction. It’s a media landscape, if you like. It’s almost completely dominated by advertising, TV, mass-merchandising, politics conducted as advertising. People’s lives, even their individual private lives, are getting more and more controlled by what I call fiction. By fiction I mean anything invented for imaginative purposes. For example, you don’t buy an airline ticket, you don’t just buy transportation, let’s say, to the south of France or Spain. What you buy is the image of a particular airline, the kind of miniskirts the hostesses are wearing on that airline. In fact, airlines in America are selling themselves on this sort of thing.
"Also the sort of homes people buy for themselves, the way they furnish their houses, even the way they talk, the friends they have, everything is becoming fictionalised. Therefore, given that reality is now a fiction, it’s not necessary for the writer to invent the fiction. The writer’s relationship with reality is completely the other way around. It’s the writer’s job to find the reality, to invent the reality, not to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there. The greatest fictional characters of the twentieth century are people like the Kennedys. They’re a twentieth-century House of Atreus.”
