Afterword
You’re still at the beginning of your journey towards professional software engineering. But I hope this book could give you a glimpse into what lies ahead.
If you want to learn more, I recommend these for your next read:
- [2] The Pragmatic Programmer: Your Journey to Mastery by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt (20th Anniversary Edition, 2019) – This book expands on many of the coding principles we’ve touched on, offering practical advice for succeeding as a programmer in industry.
- [1] The Algorithm Design Manual by Steven Skiena (2020) – A deep dive into algorithms and data structures to sharpen your algorithmic thinking skills.
Iterate faster
Research is an inherently iterative process (Figure 1): You start with an exciting hypothesis, run experiments, face disappointing results, reflect, learn, refine your ideas, and eventually gain enough insight to publish.
I believe that Clarity-Driven Development (CDD) will help you accelerate this cycle. It enables you to form stronger hypotheses and implement experiments more efficiently. Disappointing results will still happen—there’s no avoiding that—but with CDD, your iteration loops become shorter, and progress comes faster.

Good luck! 🚀
Give me feedback, please!
I’m always looking to improve the contents of this book (or any other resources you can find on my website). Therefore, I would be eternally grateful for your feedback—whether you just found a typo, you think an explanation is unclear, or there are other topics that you think this book should cover—please send me an email to hey@franziskahorn.de
and let me know what you think!