cookies and code

The conference ended with a keynote presentation from Obie Fernandez. The topic of his presentation was “Mastering the Art of Application Development”. Obie presented the perspective that software development is more of an art than anything else. He went into detail about how mastery requires practice and that a developer, similar to a craftsman or an artist, goes through, or should go through, the stages of apprentice, journeyman, and master. He shed light on a few practices that he felt were myths (e.g. – practice makes perfect may not necessarily be the case if you practice while making mistakes and learn to adopt it as perfect). Obie used the analogy of a painter and the difficulty required over the ages to work with oil paints and their respective tools. He equated this to the evolution of software development and using the right tools when building an application. To my surprise, he also spoke to Zed’s post, showing an ad from the back of an art magazine selling the promise of learning to paint without effort next to a RoR for Dummies book with the word “ghetto?” underneath. In the end Obie focussed on showing us that after the years pass no one will remember if you programmed in Rails or anything else, but they will remember the results of those efforts (e.g. – what Twitter did for communications over the Internet).

Overall it was a good presentation. The idea of walking a career path involving an apprenticeship I think is a very powerful and practical one. Many engineering disciplines require apprenticeship for extensive periods of time before you can even call yourself an engineer. Software engineering as a discipline is gaining traction at universities and with the IEEE but its true acceptance in our industry, short of everyone wanting to use the title, is slow paced. I believe our industry still has lot of maturing to do until we can even begin to solidify what would be involved in composing a true discipline (although the SEI is doing a lot of work towards this goal). Many, including myself, think that testing will be key to some sort of success, but my opinion is probably a bit naive and inexperienced, so take it for what you will. Additionally, please keep in mind that my definition of a discipline is intended to be within the context of specificity. I use it leaving room for variation such that mastery, in terms of what Obie spoke about, can occur for specific domains of software development, not the entire field. Also, I don’t think of mastery as solely applicable to programming, but the software development process. After all, the most “beautiful code” in the world is worthless unless its potential for use can been fully realized and manifested … or something like that.

Great job on your first keynote Obie; after reflecting back upon it, I enjoyed it.