Preface

“There are no experts. There is only us.”

These two simple sentences always make me feel lonely. They were uttered by Jeremy D. Miller, a software developer and architect I’ve come to appreciate over the years. These sentences give me the feeling that there’s nobody else to turn to—that I have to start trusting my own instincts, and that whoever tells you they are an expert is either lying or wrong.

During my career, which consists of almost two decades in the IT business as of the time of this writing, I’ve come to realize that “There are no experts. There is only us” is very true. During one of my first jobs as a programmer, I joined a team working on a government project (the project was all in Visual Basic 6.0). The team, including my team leader, had no idea what they were doing, but because I also didn’t know what I was doing, I assumed that whatever people were doing was the right way to do it.

As time went by, I began to read books about how software development could work, including The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1974) and Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister (Dorset House Publishing, 1987). I looked around and recognized all the problems those books were talking about right there in front of me.