Ok, so maybe it’s not just developers who think they know everything, but there does seem to be a stronger concentration of ‘know-it-alls’ within our community. You know the person, they are always right and they are unable to see another perspective. What’s more annoying is that they have a terrible habit of telling you that everything would have been perfect if you’d done things their way. They don’t tell you this at the start of a project when such insights would be useful, they wait until it is too late, safe in their perfect imaginary world – hindsight makes everything easy.

Maybe you are that person, maybe in your world everything is black and white, but for the rest of us, there is plenty of grey.

If you are going to preach ‘the one true path’ of software development, you’d better be damn sure your own work is flawless. Any hint of imperfection and you just look stupid.

It seems to me that the best developers know they’re not perfect. They strive to learn, to improve and are humble with it.

Take Jeff Atwood or Eric Sink for example.