71–80 of 139 posts
I just buy a new copy of A Pattern Language whenever I see it in a bookstore, because I know I'm going to end up giving it to someone. It's one of those books you can confidently recommend to any curious, intelligent person, and it may change their thinking, or at least blow their mind, whether they find it useful or not. He was such an original thinker.
This video of him from 1996 is amazing with hindsight. A must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA RIP Christopher Alexander
This is very interesting, but his main concerns (the creation of what he calls "living structures", "nurturing structures", and things that make people "feel whole") seem to be completely and utterly divorced from what people in the computer field are interested in.
Saw him speak at Berkeley around the time his book on the Eshin project was released. Talked in very strong terms about the importance of working in a holistic, caring way. A SWE in the audience spoke up, saying basically "look, we want to follow that approach, but it's hard, we have a lot of stakeholders to satisfy in order for a project to happen." Alexander was unyielding. "Once you've worked with love, you won't…
I wouldn't call it love per se , but it certainly does take a special kind of empathy to put yourself in the shoes of someone using your software, and to use that perspective to make a great product.
This philosophy is succinctly summarised in the book Peopleware:
> local control of design by those who will occupy the space
Unfortunately this aspect of Alexander's philosophy of letting the users participate in the design, construction or customisation of building and towns was ignored, while the other idea of design patterns became very popular when adapted to software.
Some software is built for a market where the buyers are the end-users to software. Other software is built for markets where the purchasing decision is made by a committee of stakeholders, perhaps excluding the people who will be the day to day users of the software. If you contrast the two in terms of usability, you can start to appreciate what Alexander was getting at.
He turns up in Stewart Brand's excellent TV programme How Buildings Learn , which is also on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brandst
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog https://archive.org/details/wholeearth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Mollison https://billmollison.org/
- - - -
Christopher Alexander developed a site called "Building Living Neighborhoods" about just that: https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm
Saw him speak at Berkeley around the time his book on the Eshin project was released. Talked in very strong terms about the importance of working in a holistic, caring way. A SWE in the audience spoke up, saying basically "look, we want to follow that approach, but it's hard, we have a lot of stakeholders to satisfy in order for a project to happen." Alexander was unyielding. "Once you've worked with love, you won't…
I wouldn't call it love per se , but it certainly does take a special kind of empathy to put yourself in the shoes of someone using your software, and to use that perspective to make a great product.
> In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development. On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris, Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". There's nothing wrong with that, and it has everything to do with the history of the ownership of all the bits of property on the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't call it love per se , but it certainly does take a special kind of empathy to put yourself in the shoes of someone using your software, and to use that perspective to make a great product.
What if you work in the ad industry and doing what your real users want hurts your bottom line?
What I would advise is treating each job as a college course which you also happen to be paid for. For me, this meant not allowing myself to become emotionally invested in the work, taking good notes about what I learned each day, and looking for a new job (typically with a raise) once those notes were sparse for too long.
I just buy a new copy of A Pattern Language whenever I see it in a bookstore, because I know I'm going to end up giving it to someone. It's one of those books you can confidently recommend to any curious, intelligent person, and it may change their thinking, or at least blow their mind, whether they find it useful or not. He was such an original thinker.
That book changed my life. We bought our house using those principles, and couldn't be happier or more comfortable.
One lightbulb that went off for me when reading his books was the pattern of "windows on 2 sides of a room".
I realized the house I grew up in was a big mass-produced rectangle with windows on the front and back. And since no rooms spanned the house front to back, that means that no room in the ~3000 sq ft. house had windows on 2 sides. (This is close to "McMansion" architecture but not quite)
Since then I've noticed people gravitate towards rooms with windows on 2 sides, and now I live in a apartment with many windows.
For better or worse I've lived on both coasts and everything is "economically optimized" there. In SF and NYC it's very common to see long skinny apartments that were split down the middle at some point in the last ~50 years, lacking windows. And it's also common to see very boxy and optimized new buildings, i.e. lacking architecture. They're optimized for density and not living quality.
I may be buying a house, but these requirements basically amount to extremely expensive, old houses of a limited stock. I'd be interested in any counterexamples to that!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have several junior developers on my team who came from the customer success / support side of the business who grew themselves into developer roles. They typically have not only the strongest desire to learn & improve, but also the most empathy and understanding of our impact on customers & their livelihood.
Yes! If you can get somebody on your team that has worked their way up from, for example, a customer service contact center, they'll be immensely valuable. Just their insight on what customers love and hate about your product is probably worth their hire.
The benefits would be endless, and they'd "cut their teeth" on solving crunch problems for themselves/their teams.