The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger (original narration by Randall)

> Error establishing a database connection :( I got the article on the 3rd refresh, here it is incase anyone is having connectivity issues: ===== A few years back I read Rands’ blog post about the Free Electron developer archetype: “the single most productive developer you’re ever going to meet.” This is a good archetype to understand, identify, recruit, and retain. I would like to discuss another related archetype which can be quite powerful if properly harnessed: The Honey Badger. [this video] “There is no other animal in the kingdom of all animals, as fearless as the crazyass Honey Badger.” Like the honey badger itself, the honey-badger developer has no fear. They will undertake any project, with any technology, on any deadline. They will not be paralyzed by the impossibility of choosing a good architecture. They will proceed single-mindedly in the direction of the current stated requirements, even as those requirements change. What makes for a honey-badger developer? * Willing to work with grotty systems * Uses undocumented APIs * Reverse engineers protocols * Finds third party libraries whenever possible * Able to glue anything to anything else * Able to work within really challenging constraints * Pursues a successful implementation regardless of architectural purity * Gets things done Of course, these are not universally positive traits. If you are developing the foundation of a new software platform, a new hypervisor or database kernel, you won’t want to make these kind of

A honey-badger[1] approach to problem solving. So many people let themselves be "blocked". Rarely are they really blocked, they simply want someone to tell them the answer. This one personality trait has been responsible for a good 40%[2] of my success I'd say. I developed this skill because I literally had no one to ask for help with questions when I was learning software engineering, but I think anyone can develop it by simply not giving up when they hit a hard patch. I'm not saying not to use Stack Overflow -- that's a great way to get through the hard patch. But one thing that happens repeatedly for me (and I suspect for everyone) is that I'll get stuck and no one has left a written history of how to solve that problem. Honey badger reads the code of the library they're using. Honey badger learns to trace the packets. Honey badger reads logs. Honey badger learns gdb and strace. Honey badger doesn't hope in vain for someone on the Internet to play the role of deus ex machina, because they don't have time for that. Honey badger Keeps Going. [1] [this video] [2] my personal breakdown: 50% luck, 40% perseverance, 10% ability to retain details