81–90 of 139 posts
He's on my "recommended reading" list, I had _no_ idea he was so enmeshed in software: https://josh.works/recommended-reading#a-pattern-language-to...
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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.
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.
Do you have a particularly large team? Or a particularly good process for 'onboarding' new/less-experienced engineers?
Sounds like a lot of things are going right at your company for your team to have picked up several developers this way.
> There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. [...] It is not only simpler beauty of form and color. Man can make that without making nature. It is not only fitness to purpose. Man can make that too, without making nature. And it is not only the spiritual quality of beautiful mus…
"And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself."
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.
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That book changed my life. We bought our house using those principles, and couldn't be happier or more comfortable.
I'd be interested in any details on that, i.e. what the house is like. 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 c…
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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?
"Right livelihood" is a thing. It might not be easy but you should.
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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.
Then i stumbled across “Notes on the synthesis of form” from some random internet recommendation.
Not only was this book a complete eye opener, it helped me to understand so much about what I was doing was mostly by accident, and that design should be purposeful.
The most important lesson for my fledgling mind though was that design was a process, and a process that improved with each application. That good software developers arnt “born”, they are self sculpted.
I still have that battered, note riddled, page corners folded copy of “notes” and I take with me on holiday every year to re-read. Its my most favourite book I’ve ever read. It fills me with such inspiration everytime I read it.
I’m very sad to hear of Christophers passing. I never got to thank him.
He turns up in Stewart Brand's excellent TV programme How Buildings Learn , which is also on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brandst
That channel seems to have episodes 2 to 6, but not 1.
Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maTkAcDbrEY