Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer
content.nanobox.io
Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer
1–10 of 91 posts
Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer
#2The term artisan always makes me think of pizza. How about referring to ourselves as smiths instead? Imagine upon being asked what do you do for a living and responding that you're a codesmith!
Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer
#3The term artisan always makes me think of pizza. How about referring to ourselves as smiths instead? Imagine upon being asked what do you do for a living and responding that you're a codesmith!
I like the term craftsman
Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer
#4The term artisan always makes me think of pizza. How about referring to ourselves as smiths instead? Imagine upon being asked what do you do for a living and responding that you're a codesmith!
Word definitions follow
ar·ti·san noun: artisan; plural noun: artisans a worker in a skilled trade, especially one that involves making things by hand. synonyms: craftsman, craftswoman, craftsperson; skilled worker, technician; smith, wright, journeyman; archaicartificer "artisans from around North America will demonstrate their crafts"
smith noun: smith; plural noun: smiths 1. a worker in metal. short for blacksmith.
It seems artisan is more appropriate.
Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer
#5The term artisan always makes me think of pizza. How about referring to ourselves as smiths instead? Imagine upon being asked what do you do for a living and responding that you're a codesmith!
But doesn't the word "smith" give more of an impression of doing grunt stuff?
Developers tend to be much more creative than that.
Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer
#6The term artisan always makes me think of pizza. How about referring to ourselves as smiths instead? Imagine upon being asked what do you do for a living and responding that you're a codesmith!
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.
Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer
#7I was expecting an article focussing on how making software is not engineering said to myself, "not this again."
But the article isn't arguing that, the article seems to be arguing we are something more than engineers.
There is a subtle implication that engineers are hyper pragmatic and the only thing that is important is that it works. My wife who is a biomedical engineer and makes robots might disagree. In fact, I don't know many good engineers of any kind that stop at "just working."
I think this artisan argument could also be applied to other types of engineering as well.
However, the title is slightly off, it should probably be "You Are an Artisan, Not JUST an Engineer" --- the two aren't mutually exclusive and the author even acknowledges that in the first paragraph.
Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer
#8I'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.
Re: Developer Manifesto – You Are an Artisan, Not an Engineer
#9I'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.