PragDave

Software Archaeology

Sam Williams recently interviewed Grady Booch, Ward Cunningham, and myself about software archaeology; the issues surrounding preserving and understanding existing software. Grady focused on the preservation aspects, keeping archives of worthy software in museums. Ward and I concentrated on the issues on understanding the code that you come across (not just in a historical sense; this stuff is useful when maintaining code that’s six months old). The resulting article in Salon is fairly high level, but the underlying message is an important one.

Verbing the Noun Article Online

The latest of our Construction columns for IEEE Software is now online. This one’s based heavily on Artifacting, a blog entry I wrote a while back on the importance of the verbs in our lives.

How to Keep Your Server...

My talk How To Keep Your Job just got Slashdotted as a result of a CNN article on the move of IT jobs abroad. There's a telling quote in the CNN article:

Like many unemployed programmers, Kerrigan blames the sour labor market on offshore outsourcing -- the migration of tech jobs to relatively low-paid contractors or locally hired employees in India, China, Russia and other developing countries.

The real problem is that as development becomes a commodity, basic economics dictates that companies have no choice but to look for the cheapest options. The only solution for Mr Kerrigan and the thousands of other displaced developers is to reexamine their position in this brave (and scary) new world. What is our individual value-add, and how can we position ourselves to be effective and attractive in the new marketplace? We need to think hard about the value chain and our position on it. And once we've made our decisions, we have to work hard to position ourselves. In the long term, the industry will simply move up the value chain, which will be to all our benefits as long as we're prepared to move with it. In the short and medium terms, though, we're facing a massive shakeout. Perhaps it's time to dust off your Pragmatic Investment Plan...

Declaration of Independence

On the Fourth of July, I went over to the archives to read a transcription of the Declaration of Independence. In a way it seems cheap to draw project-team lessons from such a document, but there is a wonderful quote in the middle that I hadn’t noticed before:

"experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

Are we currently putting up with things "to which we have become accustomed" rather than fighting to right them?