Last Friday was my last day working at Continuum Analytics. I enjoyed my time at the company, and wish success to it, but the time has come for me to move on. Starting later this year, I will start working with Anthony Scopatz at his new lab ERGS at the University of South Carolina.

During my time at Continuum (over two years if you count a summer internship), I primarily worked on the Anaconda distribution and its open source package manager, conda. I learned a lot of lessons in that time, and I'd like to share some of them here.

In no particular order:

• Left to their own devices, people will make the minimal possible solution to packaging. They won't try to architect something. The result will be over-engineered, specific to their use-case, and lack reproducibility.

• The best way to ensure that some software has no bugs is for it to have many users.

• Be wary of the "software would be great if it weren't for all the users" mentality (cf. the previous point).

• Most people don't code defensively. If you are working on a project that requires extreme stability, be cautious of contributions from those outside the development team.

• Hostility towards Windows and Windows users doesn't help anyone.

• https://twitter.com/asmeurer/status/593170976981913600

• For a software updater, stability is the number one priority. If the updater breaks, how can a fix be deployed?

• Even if you configure your program to update itself every time it runs you will still get bug reports with arbitrarily old versions.

• Separating components into separate git repositories leads to a philosophical separation of concerns among the components.

• Everyone who isn't an active developer on the project will ignore this separation and open issues in the wrong repo.

• Avoid object oriented programming when procedural programming will do just fine.¹

• Open source is more about the open than the source. Develop things in the open, and you will create a community that respects you.¹

• Academics (often) don't know good software practices, nor good licensing practices.

• Neither do some large corporations.

• Avoid over-engineering things.

• Far fewer people than I would have thought understand the difference between hard links and soft links.²

• Changelogs are useful.

• Semantic versioning is over-hyped.

• If you make something and release it, the first version should be 1.0 (not 0.1 or 0.0.1).

• Getting a difficult package to compile is like hacking a computer. All it takes is time.

• It doesn't matter how open source friendly your business is, there will always be people who will be skeptical and point their fingers at the smallest proprietary components, fear monger, and overgeneralize unrelated issues into FUD. These people should generally be ignored.

• Don't feed the trolls.¹

• People constantly misspell the name of Apple's desktop operating system.

• People always assume you have way more automation than you really do.

• The Python standard library is not a Zen garden. Some parts of it are completely broken, and if you need to rely on them, you'll have to rewrite them. shutil.rmtree on Windows is one example of this.

• Linux is strictly backwards compatible. Windows is strictly forwards compatible. ³

• On Linux, things tend to be very simple. On Windows, things tend to be very complicated.

• I can't decide about OS X. It lies somewhere in between.

• Nobody uses 32-bit Linux. Why do we even support that?

• People oversimplify the problem of solving for package dependencies in their heads. No one realizes that it's meaningless to say something like "the dependencies of NumPy" (every build of every version of NumPy has its own set of dependencies, which may or may not be the same).

• Writing a set of rules and a solver to solve against those rules is relatively easy. Writing heuristics to tell users why those rules are unsolvable when they are is hard.

• SAT solvers solve NP-complete problems in general, but they can be very fast to solve common case problems. ¹

• Some of the smartest people I know, who otherwise make very rational and intelligent decisions, refuse to update to Python 3.

• As an introvert, the option of working from home is great for maintaining sanity.

• Aeron chairs are awesome.

• If living in Austin doesn't turn you into a foodie you will at least gain a respect for them.

• Twitter, if used correctly, is a great way to interact with your users.

• Twitter is also a great place to learn new things. Follow John Cook and Bret Victor.

• One of the best ways to make heavily shared content is to make it about git (at least if you're an expert).

• A good optimization algorithm avoids getting caught in local maxima by trying different parts of the search space that initially appear to be worse. The same approach should be taken in life.

Footnotes