Software Engineering as a Craft An Article by Thomas Wilson thomaswilson.xyz The decreasingly tangible product of code, i.e. that all we have are files on a hard-drive, may make it easy to forget that writing software produces a thing. If you produce a wonky chair or an overly long fork, it’s easy to see the quality of work was not great. By calling for a perception of software as a craft, we fight against that ability to forget or not notice the final quality of the product. You could watch two software engineers with different levels of experience, or in different domains, and it wouldn’t necessarily be so easy to guess which is which, at least from a distance. So maybe there is something to be said for the value of software as a craft, for sometimes focusing on the practice of making better, or at least different, software just for the sake of it. craftsoftware
On Memory Palaces & Visual Computation An Essay by Taulant Sulko www.are.na Show image 0 Show image 1 I now use Are.na as a Memory Palace, separating my channels into rooms. For example, I have a channel that I call the Computation Room. It’s pretty generic and includes any type of block that relates to computation. If I notice a pattern in the computation room I create a more specific channel in that room. I think of that more specific topic as an object within the room. Then there are the adjacent topics that I often find even more exciting to focus on. For those, I choose a name that corresponds with the nature of a room and also its size. For example I have a channel called the Visual Computing Observatory. In my head I am imagining an actual observatory where I am looking and observing and studying a given topic. The Method of Loci memorycommonplaceplace