The Poetry of Programming

“Writing software should be treated as a creative activity. Just think about it–the software that’s interesting to make is software that hasn’t been made before. Most other engineering disciplines are about building things that have been built before. People say, “Well, how come we can’t build software the way we build bridges?” The answer is that we’ve been building bridges for thousands of years, and while we can make incremental improvements to bridges, the fact is that every bridge is like some other bridge that’s been built. Someone says, “Oh, let’s build a bridge across this river. The river is this wide, it’s this deep, it’s got to carry this load. It’s for cars, pedestrians, or trains, so it will be kind of like this one or that one.” They can know the category of bridge they’re building, so they can zero in on the design pretty quickly. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

I pay a great deal of attention to punctuation, and abuse it in nearly every sentence that I write. This essay by Paul Robinson sounds like something I’d write, if I actually knew what the hell I was talking about.

Originally, I was only going to post “important” development or

net-related topics around here. That hasn’t exactly panned out, since I

seem to put just about anything I feel like up here lately. So, instead

of feeling guilty about it, I’ve decided that anything goes.

Follow along if you like.

David Sifri spends some time fixing a technorati bug, and has some [intersting

observations](http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000249.html#000249) on the process.

“But sometimes you’re stuck. You can’t figure out why something is going wrong. Your usual swami-like powers are just not clicking when it comes to this problem. So you get frustrated. This is a very dangerous time - Pirsig calls this a gumption trap opportunity. Because you’re stuck, you search for answers, and are willing to take blind chances in order to fix the problem expeditiously. That’s usually right about when all hell breaks loose, and you really start to fuck things up.”

That sounds about right.

Jeremy Zawodny has written an article for Linux Magazine that does a great job explaining why MySQL 4.x is so nice.

Doc Searls and David Weinberger define What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else in World of Ends

“Enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated

intensity of behaviors whose purpose it is to detect threats.”

Wikis are a fantastic and drop-dead simple way to create a collaborative, multi-author web environment. My efforts to integrate them into the workflow at Fusionary have met with everything from reluctant acceptance to blank stares. A wiki is not supposed to be pretty, but I tend to agree with this piece explaining why the visual representation of most wikis can put off many potential users. I think I’ll try a visual update to our internal wikis and see what the reaction is.

Lots of opinions out there on the new Apple music service. Personally,

I think .99 per song won’t be cheap enough to pull people away from

the free P2P networks, especially since the files are riddled with

DRM. I’ll stick with eMusic, primarily for the reasons listed here. Of course,

not having an OS X Mac handy makes that decision easier.

I’ve spent a good deal of time thinking of how to implement comments in a blosxom weblog. There are people working on it, and I’m sure they’ll do a fine job. I stopped worrying about it when I realized that I don’t want comments on this site.

Why? Because I don’t necessarily want to have a conversation with any number of people on any number of topics. I write about and link to things I find interesting. If you have something interesting to say about it,

go

start

your

own

blog