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
Walking is a natural armature for thinking sequentially Walking is a natural armature for thinking sequentially. It also has a historic relationship to mental organization that ranges from the Peripatetics, to the philosophers of Kyoto, to the clockwork circuit of Immanuel Kant, to the sublimities of the English Romantics and their passages through nature. It is not simply an occasion for observation but an analytic instrument. Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan Reveries of a Solitary Walker walkingthinking