“Software Is An Art”
It’s a great line, isn’t it? “ Software is an Art ” tells us that we’re doing is Craft, that we’re Creative, our work is Unique, and we’re all snowflakes. The problem, however, is that so much of our day-to-day work in the field is just so bloody mundane, there just doesn’t seem to be all that much Craft to it, let alone Art . Think about it — so much of our work is some combination of looking stuff up on StackOverflow, adding in all the boilerplate around what we found to make sure it complies with whatever the internal guidelines are, and then adding in a metric ton of instrumentation, logging, and whatnot to deal with the inevitable late-night debugging sessions when it turns out that StackOverflow Is Not Infallible. This isn’t entirely an accident though — the Edison quote about genius being 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration has a tremendous amount of truth to it. Even more importantly, we tend to forget that so much of what we consider “craft” is actually mind-num...
