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Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer

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Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer

#31

Post by ashark »

torstenvl wrote: post #6
technologyvault wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But doesn't the word "smith" give more of an impression of doing grunt stuff? Developers tend to be much more creative than that.

Except that "smith" had already been adopted metaphorically for the knowledge class. Writers are "wordsmiths" rather than "sentence artisans." It also emphasizes the fact that coding is an iterative process. Sometimes you have to strip the whole thing down, make your codebase malleable again, and pound away to refashion it a different way.

I'd say that at our best we might claim to be Hephaestans. Wikipedia gives him all of "blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors". Basically a god of engineering and the more construction-ish arts. The literary and musical arts, et c., would belong to others.

"Thetis of the silver feet came to the house of Hephaistos, imperishable, starry, and shining among the immortals, built in bronze for himself by the god of the dragging footsteps. She found him sweating as he turned here and there to his bellows busily, since he was working on twenty tripods which were to stand against the wall of his strong-founded dwelling. And he had set golden wheels underneath the base of each one so that of their own motion they could wheel into the immortal gathering, and return to his house: a wonder to look at. These were so far finished, but the elaborate ear handles were not yet on. He was forging these, and beating the chains out."

- The Iliad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hephaestus

Probably we should choose Hephaestans over Vulcans, to avoid confusion.

Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer

#32

Post by Animats »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #9
rb808 wrote: post #8

I'd think reality is more like tradesman or software builder rather than engineer. Most devs aren't doing anything new or different. There are probably guys in the building next door probably doing something similar.

Engineers of any kind usually aren't doing something radically different. Even if you are building a robot, which is undoubtedly engineering, you probably have a team down the road building something similar. In fact, most software engineers I know are very interested in the cutting edge and research pieces. You can make a living as a mechanical engineer without using an equation newer than a few hundred years.

You can make a living as a mechanical engineer without using an equation newer than a few hundred years.

Have you seen what's happened to control theory in the last 15 years? There's so much new math that new PhDs are having trouble deciding which parts to learn. Control theory has imported much of machine learning in addition to all the classic control theory, and they want bounds so they know the machine learning parts won't do something stupid.

Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer

#33

Post by luddypants »

jMyles wrote: post #12
dctoedt wrote: post #11

This reminded me of something written by noted surgeon (and Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow) Atul Gawande [0]: If medicine is a craft , then you focus on teaching obstetricians to acquire a set of artisanal skills —the Woods corkscrew maneuver … , the Lovset maneuver …, the feel of a forceps for a baby whose head is too big. … You accept that things will not always work out in everyone’s hands . But if medicine i…

That is one of the most subtly disturbing snippets I've ever read about the state of the medical "system" in the USA.

Can you elaborate on what you find disturbing? The implication of high failure rate, or the shift of focus to reliability?

Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer

#35

Post by xirdstl »

cortesoft wrote: post #15

Oh my god this is such pompous article. None of these things are specific to software developers, and 90% of the things it says are platitudes that mean nothing. There are even some that are just wrong, like the 'throw it away' section. "It's not the code that is valuable. It's the understanding you've gained from building it." What? Maybe at some places, but where I work, the software I write is NEEDED. And this: "N…

I mostly agree. They're selling a development platform. You could look at this at marketing fluff aimed at stroking the egos of their prospective customers.

Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer

#36

Post by spraak »

cortesoft wrote: post #15

Oh my god this is such pompous article. None of these things are specific to software developers, and 90% of the things it says are platitudes that mean nothing. There are even some that are just wrong, like the 'throw it away' section. "It's not the code that is valuable. It's the understanding you've gained from building it." What? Maybe at some places, but where I work, the software I write is NEEDED. And this: "N…

> Has he never heard of the second system effect?

My team and I were recently working on a replacement for an old service. One weekend I thought, "I could re-write the whole thing in a way better, clever-er way!" I stayed up way too late hacking on it. It was my masterpiece. Sunday night I uploaded it to our org's GitHub and then on Monday the team lead was like "Um, what's that?" and then I knew that the feelings I'd ignored while writing it were true: it was a waste of time. We weren't going to use my new re-write.

Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer

#40

Post by treehau5 »

> Writing stable code and being available to fix your bugs, even sometimes after hours.

Nah I'd rather be available during hours to fix my bugs. Call me old fashioned, but does anyone not believe your work should not follow you home? I love what France is doing with the "right to disconnect"

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