Blog: First Things

"This page is dedicated to the many graduate students I've had the good fortune to know. Thank you all, every one."
- Jim Fawcett

Initial Thoughts:

I believe that "Software Developer" is a great job description! Developers are engineers. We use interesting technology to build great products. We're scientists, finding new ways to build and think about software artifacts in provably better ways. Developers work in communities. Almost all professional software is built by teams of developers who work together on products, many of which may have millions of lines of code. That means that several hundred people collaborate on common construction goals. So software developers need to have the skills to communicate their specifications, designs, implementations, test results, issues they think are important, and to report progress and results. Developers are creative craftsmen and artists. Most programming languages give us great freedom in how we express our design ideas and implement them in working programs. We can use that freedom to structure code for our fellows as well as for the translators and machines on which it runs. We want to make our programs elegant and simple, make their intents clear, and make them quick and reliable. There is a lot of similarity between software source code and literature. Both are created out of mind stuff, both are constrainded by syntax and convention and the realities of their context, and both capture a specific implementation of some concept. For a program that is an operational concept the program follows to define it's tasks and operations. For literature that is the plot line its narrative follows to construct a story. Both literature and software source code benefit greatly from well-formed concept and a swift editorial red pencil. Software technology is gloriously chaotic - constantly growing, shedding old idioms, adopting new ideas and paradigms. It concerns itself with: the artifacts of machines, languages and their translation, tools for packaging and maintaining big complex systems, and other tools to abstract and visualize meaning hidden within clusters of files and machines. Much of the functionality of modern life is driven by software, and as we learn to succeed building complex products to support that, we're asked to accept ever larger construction tasks that tax our abilities to understand and create these things. In these pages I intend to engage, with you, thoughts about all of these aspects of our job description: the technology and science of building software, the affects and affectations of community, and most often comment on examples of the art and craftsmanship of our profession.