A software conference that advocates for quality

I'm disillusioned because it never happens, but purveyors of conferences and books are happy to sell the promised land™ of how "it's really going to be different this time."

Processes, tools, and diligence vigilantly seem the most apparent path. Perhaps rehash the 50 year old debate of professionalization while AI vibes coding is barking at the door, because what could possibly go wrong with even less experience doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

Aye, it never happens but it does sell a lot of books ;)

I don't think we'll reach this promised land™ until incentives re-align. Treating software as an assembly line was obviously The Wrong Thing judging by the results - problem is how can we ever move to a model that rewards quality perhaps similar to (book) authors and royalties?

Owner-operator SaaS is about as close as you can get but limits you to web and web-adjacent.

Just like all the fitness content.

Get couple shredded guys and gals to show off how fit they are so everyone feels guilty they are snacking past 8PM.

Sell another batch of “how to do pushups” followed by “how to do pushups vol.2” with “pushup pro this time even better”.

Where in the end normal people are not getting paid for getting shredded, they get paid for doing their stuff.

I just constantly feel like I am not a proper dev because I mostly skip unit tests - but on the other hand I built last 15 years couple of systems that worked and were bringing in value.

Why would you skip unit tests? Especially in the AI age. You can quickly verify your behavior. Also, by not writing them you're also missing out on opportunities to modularize your code.

Obviously, this assumes you write enterprise grade code. YMMV

You can write modular code without writing tests - I write testable code - I don't write tests. When I need I can always add them back, but I tend to skip it as mostly it doesn't make sense.

But still cottage industry of "clean code" is pushing me into self doubts and shame.

If it's testable it's trivial to write tests for! You don't want the next person to introduce a bug, do you?

Read my original post again. We don’t have bugs that all those “do it right way” people claim doing it for 15 years with good track record.

You just contribute to BS scare tactics of people selling “clean code”.

How do you know you don't have bugs? Is everything instrumented (observable)? I could just as easily say you're peddling ignorance as bliss!