Or: the Origins of Opera and the Future of Programming. (video, or TL;DR, or abstract) At the end of this post is an audacious idea about the present and future of software development. In the middle are points about mental models: how important and how difficult they are. But first, a story of the origins …
Read moreCollective problem solving in music, art, science, and software
Does caring scale? We can’t all care about everything. We have cities without clean water, a criminal justice system full of injustice, and oceans clogged with paper bags. There are too many important causes to catalogue, much less champion. We can only contribute to a few. We can’t all care about everything. At my house, …
Understanding code under change Why is it so hard to jump into a team and start contributing to code? Why is someone else’s code so darn incomprehensible? One reason is that the code is a snapshot of a system in process. If you know where it was and where it’s aiming, the middle makes more …
When you learn to code, you acquire a superpower: automation. We turn the computer into a machine to do our (very specific) bidding. We get paid to automate what other people want. We can and should use this superpower for ourselves too! Levels of automation Are we programmers or software developers? Probably both. I think …
(This post continues from the Royal Yak, and concludes the series A Taxonomy of Yaks.) When we improve how we work, we make tasks faster. We make progress smoother. This is magnified when we improve how all our team members work, or our whole community. Now and then, though, an improvement turns into something more: …
(continued from Trim Yaks; part of the Taxonomy of Yak Shaving series) Royal Yak, aka Yakkity Yak (quote from yakbreeder.com) Talking to people is yak shaving; it is an intermediate task that helps you get your official tasks done. It’s usually seen as a separate way to “waste” time. I’m here to call relationship-building out …
(continued from Imperial Yaks; part of A Taxonomy of Yak Shaving series) Trim Yaks, aka, the Hackhacking yak (making coding faster) Each of the previous yaks stood in the way of a particular task. The Trim Yak is not so task-specific; these are the ones that let us work faster generally. I nickname them “Hackhacking Yaks” …
(continued from Attack Yak; series begins with Taxonomy of Yak Shaving) Sometimes you’re coding along, writing tests as little experiments “this should fail because I haven’t implemented the parser for it yet” — and it fails in a way you didn’t expect. And then you start digging and the parsing library isn’t working how you expected. And …
(This post describes the first yak category. You might choose to start with the Taxonomy of Yak Shaving intro.) Black Yak, aka Attack Yak. (quotes are from yakbreeder.com) When you feel that your task is 80% complete, these yaks form the next 80%. They are the distance between “works on my box” and “this is …
Yak Shaving is: doing seemingly-unrelated tasks to get some real task done. The name has obscure roots and doesn’t matter; the key is that it makes you think, “Why would you do that?” Yak shaving can be: I want to make dinner, but I’m doing stairs; moving objects around in order to clear a path …