I recently was asked what I would do differently if I had the experience I have now. This got me thinking about the mistakes I've made, the traps I fell for and the dogmatism I became part of over the last 28 years of professional software developer in the Microsoft realm. In this talk, I'll be going down memory lane with you and share everything I've learned on architecture, tools, technologies, agile software development, maintainable code, automated testing, documentation and anything else that I think you should know. Prepare yourself for an event of stories, both good and bad.

I've done this talk as a keynote for an audience of 450 techies.

What you shouldn't do
• Treat all problems equally
• Do code reviews if you don't care (a.k.a. superficial code reviews)
• Design patterns as a goal
• If your company depends on software, then act like a software company
• Pretend you're a software company
• Rebuild a system from scratch
• Ignore warnings and errors in build output, log files, tests
• Accept flaky tests
• Manual deployments
• Be a high-level architect
• Become a manager to earn more money
• Get stuck in priorities
• Care about estimates
• Treat technology as a goal
• Ignore your dependencies
• Use a database that isn't designed for the agile world
• Fight over coding styles
• Build frameworks
• Ignore the open-source learnings
• Keep technical decisions for yourself
• Reject a tool or practice because you sucked at it
• Obfuscate the history in source control
• Use emails
• Strive for consistency
• Let your boss tell you to not do your job
• Build micro-services to replace your monolith
• Manual testing
• Forget refactoring
• Run SQL scripts in production
• Apply DRY
• Use a dynamic programming language
• Be afraid of AI tools
• Say "it only happens once"
• Use SQL to write business logic
• Build & deployment pipelines that depend on YAML
• Use a source control system that wasn't designed for developers
• Blindly follow what conference speakers are telling you