I can't agree more. I remember the remarks of my fellow Computer Science colleagues at uni when I was off to my business courses (I did a double degree): all the reading, the essays, they were looking at it as the 'easy' , 'boring', 'irrelevant' things - because what can be more important than writing code?
Well - it helped. It helped a lot. How are you going to sell whatever it is that you're building without putting together a good description of your product or a convincing sales pitch?
Software engineers should write
141–150 of 166 posts
Re: Software engineers should write
#142I love writing, especially technical documents. It feels like the best parts of creative writing (since writing down what you're going to do is somewhat like fantasy anyway), but without the wishy-washy unreferenced opinions of non-technical writing. I always use citations, write a review of the literature, describe my solution, how I'll implement it, and what the risks are. I think I actually enjoy it more than the technical work sometimes, and it's certainly made my technical work much better planned.
Re: Software engineers should write
#143I've been saying this for so long. I realized at some point that the classes that had the greatest positive impact on my programming ability were always writing classes. Writing seems to engage the same part of the brain in a way that's just different enough to feel different. Even editing is a good lesson in refactoring. I'm always weary of any engineer who can't write.
Re: Software engineers should write
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
In "physics land" Richard Feynman is famous for his explanatory power, e.g. We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. "Don't sa…
That's an absolutely excellent story. I can recommend it to anyone on this site.
There have been some good discussions around that story here a few times when it was posted.
Re: Software engineers should write
#145Why stop at essays or technical articles? As an engineer, I've always been fascinated by the structure and inner mechanics of stories - what makes them work. As a hobby I've done a lot of reading around this; I've written three feature-length screenplays, and a novel you can find in Amazon[1], using very structure-centric approaches (as a result, my characters tend to be too flat). Take a look at The Snowflake Method…
Congratulations on getting the book written and on Amazon. I hope to follow in your footsteps in the coming year.
Like you, I'm fascinated by story structure, the hero's journey, and the mono-myth. And I've struggled with creating something less than flat characters.
I've read the Snowflake method, and parts of it definitely work for me. Another book that I highly value is Dwight Swain's Technique's of the Selling Writing. This was one of the first books that I read on writing fiction, and I still think it's one of the best. I would also recommend Baboulene's, The Story Book, for it's discussion on subtext.
Unfortunately for me, the focus on technique left me not only with flat characters but also a severe case of writer's block. However, I may have found a solution to both problems in John Dufresne's Is Life Like This? Dufresne advocates a more organic, even serendipitous, approach to story creation. For him at least, the results can be wonderful (read his Love Warps the Mind a Little, or his short stories in Johnny Too Bad), and for me, it's got me writing (finally!) and seeing my characters as something more than just cardboard cutouts. Like anything else, it's not for everybody, and YMMV.
Good luck, and keep writing!
Re: Software engineers should write
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of my friends have written some fiction novels. I wish they'd started out with short stories before going for the novel.
It might have helped... or not. Although there are lots of things you can learn from short stories, they are not all that similar to short stories in terms of the skills an author needs. For a short story writer the primary challenge is to introduce your characters, their problem and their actions in as few words as possible. Short fiction is focused . You've got one or two main characters who have one problem. Novel…
Sure, that's fair. I guess my point was that it's hard to produce something of value without some kind of practice before hand, in some form. (Maybe short to novel isn't a perfect transition, yes.)
Re: Software engineers should write
#147Many people might have already seen it, but I thought it'd make sense to mention DHH's talk at RailsConf either way.
In his talk, he is coining the term "software writer", which goes one step further and motivates a style of programming which prioritizes clarity of code over alleged technical superiority. Very opinionated, but recommended nonetheless: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LfmrkyP81M
Re: Software engineers should write
#148I was always an "English kid", came close to failing my math subjects in middle school and finally in high school, I did fail Algebra I, and had to re-take it the next year. Meanwhile, I was in advanced programming courses and on my way to take an AP Computer Science course in the last semester of my sophomore year. Looking back, that experience taught me about how important modeling is to pedagogy. The fact is, my A…
I always felt like school-level English classes were very hazy, muddy environments where you didn't need to have clear thinking and the structures (the English language mainly) didn't strictly follow any internal logic, opposite math. Peers got good marks for presenting half-baked ideas in inarticulate, thesaurus-abused essays, as long as they made sure to repeat their limp argument, cut up into a specified number of…
That echoes my experience very closely.
I also disliked the emphasis on literary analysis. It so often seemed like contrived flimflammery crossed with psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. If tvtropes (or allthetropes) had existed back then, I think I would have performed much better on my English homework. After all, those sites do include the Jungian archetypes and the basic plots as a subset.
As it is, my high school English classes drove me far away from anything even remotely similar until a lifetime of reading fiction, a shameful amount of blathering on Internet message boards, and the exhortations of the "National Novel-Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)" organization convinced me to try to write a novel in November of 2012. Two years later, I have written 500 kb, with maybe 130 kb left to go before I snap it off and start the next one. Then there's also the matter of the default HTML stylesheet, continuity notes and timelines, the character, vehicle, location, and artifact indices, working hyperlinks, and testing the release version on all available e-reader programs and devices.
As for my old English teachers, I bite my thumb at them, like Sampson. I give them the fig, like Vanni Fucci. And just as golf is a good walk, spoiled, English class is a good read, ruined. Even with those ancient cultural references rattling around my bonebox, I find that an increasingly large fraction of my memes are drawn from television, film, music, video games, and popular web sites, and a vanishingly small portion from the old literary canon.
That's how I know that the Belmonts love Devo. If you understand why, you probably won't need to thank an English teacher.
All I really ever needed was a pile of books that I enjoyed reading and a copy of Strunk and White (minus the part about always putting sentence punctuation inside the quotes, because that's just madness). What I got was about 10 years of pedagogical torture that discouraged me from trying something that turned out to be a fun hobby.
Re: Software engineers should write
#149Every programmer should read Strunk & White's The Elements of Style.
Its emphasis on clarity and concision translates directly to code, both in terms of algorithmic efficiency and human readability, comprehension, maintainability, etc.
Re: Software engineers should write
#150Why stop at essays or technical articles? As an engineer, I've always been fascinated by the structure and inner mechanics of stories - what makes them work. As a hobby I've done a lot of reading around this; I've written three feature-length screenplays, and a novel you can find in Amazon[1], using very structure-centric approaches (as a result, my characters tend to be too flat). Take a look at The Snowflake Method…
I've just completed a screen-writing course, and wrote a feature-length screenplay as part of that process, and was struck by how much like technical writing it was. A screenplay is not a story the way a novel or short story is, but rather a technical description of a story that allows the various people involved to do their jobs: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1666 Screenplay structure is so tight and formal it's alm…
Wow, fantastic work :)
I agree with what you're saying... a novel is the end product, a screenplay is a blueprint. It took me 4 years to write the novel (admittedly very on and off) and ~3 months to write each of the screenplays. Hopefully my next novel will be faster.
What was your experience of writing both formats in terms of time and effort?