March 2009

Software Development IS Like Writing a Story

by Stu Andrews on March 27, 2009

in Blog

See the previous post in this series for togetherness.

137180pxtarzan2 The reality is that people do write stories with perfect characters. While the situations in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books were broken and brought about by despicable (not many shades of gray) men and beautiful but damaged women, John Clayton (or John Carter) was pretty much perfect.

When writing software, you almost never have a perfect feature. There are so many different possibilities that somewhere, in some place, at some time, your feature would be rendered imperfect.

Gemmell might not stand against literary giants, but I’ll read him once a year at least.

Gmail doesn’t do exactly what Outlook does, but I’m not going back.

So what do we do?

We write stories and software to be more than the sum of their parts.

Popularity: 1%

{ 0 comments }

Software Development Is Not like Writing A Story

March 27, 2009

I’ll be doing another post replacing the “Is Not” with “Is” soon. In a story, you can’t have a lot of perfect characters. That’s boring. So when you write a story, you write imperfections into the characters, into the situations, into the fabric of the story itself. In a piece of software, you CAN have [...]

Read it →

Clarion Folklore Podcast #6 Is Live!

March 26, 2009

“I think that’s considered a bug isn’t it?” – Dave Harms “If you learn everything, then you know everything.” – Bruce Johnson [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Hosts Ken “Deep Assign” Wragg (http://www.agedcaresoftware.com) Dave “Clarion Sharp” Harms (http://www.clarionmag.com) Bruce “He Didn’t Know That” Johnson (http://www.capesoft.com) Stu “I Need More Diet Coke” Andrews (http://clarionfolk.com) [...]

Read it →

Why C Is Better Than C++ and Other Stories Of Opinion

March 23, 2009

Opinion. It drives our society and our singularity. C is better than C++. Python is better than both. No, Machine-Code is the way to go. If you don’t use PHP for web you’re an idiot. Scripter? Please. Rails rules. Rails bites. Language Arguments suck. If you can get things done in PHP then major (Major) [...]

Read it →

Why Is Google Analytics A Boon And A Curse? – The Cry Of A Small Pond Blogger

March 18, 2009

Ha ha. That’ll learn me. Not five minutes after posting this, Kieron of the most excellent Rock Paper Shotgun just uber-pimped Space Office Fight. I am no longer sad. Someone should wipe the smile off my face. Here’s my Google Analytics graph for the last month (ish): Impressive huh? Ahem. I’ve been doing this (blogging) [...]

Read it →

Super 14, Round 4, Waratahs vs Reds

March 17, 2009
Read it →

Reason Why A Drinking "Ban" Won’t Work

March 7, 2009

Still pumped from the match last night. There was good and bad, however the crowd around where we sat changed my mind about things. Will speak about it in the next Episode. Also, have some fantastic stuff in mind for the Match Report :) It’s going in the next Episode, but thought I’d spring this [...]

Read it →