[HN Gopher] On Craft
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On Craft
Author : rapnie
Score : 176 points
Date : 2023-09-02 12:55 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.drcathicks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.drcathicks.com)
| kosasbest wrote:
| Computers speed up craftpersonship, so it doesn't feel like
| craftpersonship, but really if you slow it down, it has elements
| of craft. Software is often rushed out the door at breakneck
| speed these days so it seems shoddily made and rushed, but then
| it works, has few bugs, and doesn't suffer from technical debt. I
| think this is miraculous and shouldn't be taken for granted.
| yuvalr1 wrote:
| This article reminds me of my grandfather as well, who sadly
| passed away two weeks ago. He was a mechanical engineer, and a
| real craftsman.
|
| One example we, in our family, like to remember is how he fixed
| the car during a long vacation trip by his own when the engine
| suddenly stopped in the middle of the road. He realized the
| problem and used his constantly at hand pocketknife and a metal
| can box he found thrown on the sideways to fix the car. The
| mechanics had hard time to remove the fix in the garage and
| replace it with an original part!
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Very nice remembrance of a grandfather. Grandfathers can be
| silent mentors and role models. Mine certainly was. I miss him
| very much.
| sgtaylor5 wrote:
| who did her website? a more glorious, beautiful light-filled site
| I haven't seen.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I can relate to her grandpa.
|
| However, it doesn't win me much support, these days.
|
| People like us aren't really what the tech industry is about. I'm
| not sure that it ever was about it (which was why I didn't append
| "any more").
|
| There was a fairly decent book, called _Software Craftsmanship_
| [0], that I read, many moons ago. I found it comforting. At least
| I wasn't a _complete_ outlier, even if I was routinely treated
| with scorn for my approach.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_craftsmanship
| prerok wrote:
| > routinely treated with scorn for my approach
|
| Seriously? I feel for you.
|
| In my experience many companies do recognize tech debt now, and
| the value in fixing it or implementing it the right way,
| although that was not so much the case in early 2000s.
|
| That said, many times we do still have to argue for time to
| refactor vs adding new features.
|
| I think that the best software craftsman is the one that can
| quickly add features without accumulating tech debt and the
| best way to do that is to just fix/refactor the other stuff
| around the feature addition immediately. It seems like the OP's
| grandpa was that kind of person.
|
| Speaking for myself, I sometimes do take longer because I want
| to get it right, even if it does mean missing an internal
| deadline. It has to have the right "smell". I have learned that
| if we don't do that then, as cruft accumulates, 3am production
| incidents will be inevitable.
|
| So, do take this to heart: if others did not understand it, it
| does not matter. You have already benefited from your approach
| :)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not a subscriber to the "YOLO/MVP" school of
| software development, which basically makes me _persona non
| grata_ in many tech crowds.
|
| When I write software, I use what I call "Constant Beta."
| Basically, my software is at a release level of Quality, from
| the very start. It may be incomplete (thus, unshippable), but
| what's there, is ready for its closeup (Mr. DeMille).
|
| Basically, before moving to the next feature, I make sure the
| one I'm working on, is complete. It may require coming back,
| after other parts of the program are done, but I always make
| sure that the API is clear, the documentation is done, and
| things like error handling and localization are in place, as
| early as possible.
|
| Surprisingly, I work very, very quickly, despite taking so
| much care. There's a number of reasons, which would require a
| series of blog posts, but the results speak for themselves.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| This speaks to me on many levels, thanks for posting.
| swayvil wrote:
| You could call "craft" _understanding and power gained from
| firsthand experience with a thing._
|
| As opposed to experience with ideas about a thing, models and
| abstractions and stories and such.
|
| The former is of course infinitely deeper.
|
| The latter, you could make a whole world out of that. And live
| inside it like a house.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| I don't like this much - somewhat vague romantic sentimentalism
| under a heading of "craft".
|
| I don't consider recognising trees as craft... or ride-on mowers
| as blue-collar... or being afraid of someone on the street at
| night as recognising the "soon to be broken"... or that "cadence"
| is a safety measure. It's often the reverse, cadence suggests not
| stopping when safety/quality is often about anyone being able to
| stop the line.
|
| As for the "family fixer"... I've known a few and the motivation
| has not been craft but as an emotional escape. Sit down and talk
| to your family? Nope, time to rehang all the pictures on the
| wall. I can recognise their panicked scan of their environment,
| desperately looking for something that could need attention. I
| think we often see "craft" type justifications for unnecessary
| work in software teams that are really avoidance of something
| more aversive.
|
| Where I find the "fixer" perspective interesting, it's
| understanding that the world is mutable and that you have the
| power to change it. It's a more natural human instinct to accept
| things that are causing a problem. It's not even lazinesses
| holding people back, it's not seeing the possibilities.
| rcme wrote:
| Fixing the loose leg of a table at a restaurant using a coin is
| definitely not craft.
| yuvalr1 wrote:
| I think we're too used to just replace things instead of fixing
| them. Fixing requires understanding of how things work, and I
| think it's a shame most of us (I include myself) don't have
| enough of this understanding regarding our day to day tools and
| objects. If fixing something requires calling an expert, it
| makes it much less appealing to fix it, than just throw it away
| and buy something new.
|
| This relatively new attitude creates motivation to even further
| divest in quality and prefer creating cheap things that break
| fast, because we won't invest the time and money needed to fix
| them anyway.
| dfee wrote:
| I concluded that the author is an outsider (to craftsmanship)
| looking through the glass at an accessible insider
| (grandfather).
|
| Whether the grandfather was, or would consider himself to be an
| insider, we can't glean and don't know, respectively.
|
| It's a sort of longing piece, and that's OK, but not what I
| expected going into it!
| killthebuddha wrote:
| The author's grandpa reminds me of Sam Hamilton from East of
| Eden, someone who (though fictional, of course) I think about
| often when I think about the kind of man I'd like to be some day.
| A couple lines in particular jumped out at me:
|
| > He had a visual vocabulary that amazed me
|
| > do you know what it is like to make your whole life?
|
| These two lines together hint at a kind of connectedness with the
| world that I sometimes feel (and observe in certain cases) an
| acute lack of. I see it in myself and in many people I care
| about, but also in the archetypes generated by the
| culture/society I'm embedded in. A lot of the time when I talk to
| people about this particular thing, they assume I'm being
| nostalgic, but I don't think so. I think we don't realize how
| many hard (as in "hard science") truths we really learn from
| casual observations of the wind and the stars and the trees.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Great article!
|
| > I have read a lot of long spiels about craft that frequently
| end in something like, software work isn't like other work, and
| we shouldn't be judged the same way. We are entirely unique. We
| are the special ones.
|
| It might comfort the author to know that even within the realm of
| software engineering, there are insiders and outsiders. Some of
| the most important engineering work was made by these outsiders.
|
| Growing up poor, self-taught, as the only programmer I knew
| around me, I felt like an outsider my entire life. When I finally
| began to associate with other programmers... I still felt like an
| outsider.
|
| Here were people from structured family units with solid life
| skills, a college education, large support networks, a lack of
| systemic trauma, and a fundamentally different understanding of
| the world. I've begun to find my place in this world, but the
| feeling of being an outsider will never fully go away.
|
| It's of little coincidence that my favorite kinds of music and
| other art are often categorized as Outsider Art.
|
| My advice... find a way into that makerspace. Open up a REPL.
| Software engineering might entail a specific rigid and deep
| understanding of engineering principles, but software
| craftsmanship is for everyone. Personal computers were _made_ for
| the average person to enhance themselves and the world around
| them, and we should never forget that.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art
| avg_dev wrote:
| i remember my third year of coding as a pro, i had just taken a
| job in palo alto and was settling in after moving. i was at my
| new job and a bunch of the coders at the company i was working
| at went out for lunch and i was getting to know them.
|
| one guy who was younger than i was was talking about how he had
| a degree from a liberal arts college, and had just been coding
| on his own for a while, and that when he moved out there for
| work and was interacting with other coders in real-life for the
| first time (previously it had been only over the internet) he
| was learning how to pronounce the names of various daemons,
| libraries, projects, etc., and that he had understood the
| pronunciations differently when he was physically on his own.
| in my head i silently said to myself, "this guy is a junior
| coder and won't amount to too much" and made a note to try to
| associate with some of the heavy hitters to try and boost my
| career and status (and i guess if i'm being charitable to
| myself, also to learn).
|
| that guy left the company maybe a year later. the company he
| went to, i think he started as a dev, later became CTO, and
| eventually CEO. while he was CEO, the company sold for over a
| billion dollars. and even when we were still working together,
| i did learn quite a few things from him. so yeah, i think it is
| easy for people to pigeonhole others, or to think that they are
| in a place of skill that others perhaps can't easily get to,
| but sometimes that kind of thinking is quite wrong. (also, at
| his new company he wrote some great blog posts on software
| development and operations practices that i really enjoyed and
| learned quite a bit from)
| epolanski wrote:
| I had some similar experiences with few self taught junior
| devs.
|
| I didn't look down on them, but was heavily surprised to see
| how much they could teach me about software or work or life.
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| As a self-taught programmer and resident of a town well under
| 20k pop (most of whom are well out of my age group), i really
| identify with this. it's helped a bit to learn deeply and
| engage with others who have done so, and in some ways is an
| extension of a broader void in my network (or lack there-of).
| it't influenced the tochnologies i've chosen and hence made me
| who i am today, but i hope the "zoom-native" generations
| broadly engage more in open online spaces and feel less of this
| pphysch wrote:
| The author doesn't use words like "pragmatic", which embody this
| essay a lot more than "craft", IMO.
|
| Craft to me implies design, which this essay doesn't touch on
| much.
| TheCleric wrote:
| I disagree, to me, craft implies an investment in making
| something that exists better or something new the best you can
| make it.
|
| It's an investment in saying that the quality matters as much
| as the function, and in many cases the quality improves the
| function.
| Michelangelo11 wrote:
| It does, a little bit. E.g.:
|
| > He would point out risky work, bad decision making in the
| form of shoddy materials or shifting angles. He was offended by
| the trace measures left in the world that signified short-term
| planning.
|
| But I definitely agree that the essay has a lot less to do with
| craft than you might think at first.
| matjazmuhic wrote:
| That was a beautiful read. Well said.
| mikewarot wrote:
| I've done guerrilla repairs to things, one time I replaced a
| missing screw on a revolving door, because I knew otherwise it
| would never happen. I replaced a ton of missing screws in some
| seats at a laundromat, I can't stand to see things that only need
| a minute of attention and a dollar worth of parts just
| accumulating around me in the world. I refactor things without
| permission, but only small, easy to undo refactors.
|
| I'm stuck at home now, with nothing but spare time, so I've
| embarked on a massive refactoring project... if it works, it'll
| be awesome... if not, I'll have learned a few new things about
| the problem domain. The itch that triggered it is simple...
| "Almost all of the transistors in a computer, at any given
| instant, are just waiting"
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Sounds like my grandfather of the same era. He wired up bomber
| control panels during WWII and was apparently quite skilled at
| it. He was a Jack of all trades, but he was primarily an
| electrician and a locksmith, though he did all kinds of tinkering
| in his garage and kept his ancient cars running. I stayed with my
| grandparents one summer when I was in Jr High. He took me out on
| electrician jobs where he'd have me fetch tools and wire. On one
| of them the inspector showed up and my grandpa introduced me to
| him. The inspector told me "I can always tell when Mel has wired
| up a panel - it's a work of art."
|
| People from that era had to endure a lot of hardship - the
| depression, WWII. They often grew up on farms. This gave them a
| lot of experience with fixing and growing things. All around
| useful skills that most of us don't have anymore.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| The phrase "shade tree mechanic" was invented for people like
| that.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| A sweet article, thanks.
|
| In trying to make my pizzas round, I realize that there's a
| _craft_ to it. It can 't be all that hard since so many people do
| it, but I haven't got it yet.
|
| Also, cooking is a craft. That's why a restaurant interview for a
| cook is often "make me an omelet." There are, indeed, some foods
| you can make strictly by following the recipe, but others take
| craft.
| prerok wrote:
| I would posit that any food can be made following a recipe. I
| know, because I am dabbling at it ;) The food will still taste
| good :)
|
| The craft here is to make it taste special, even for simple
| recipes like an omelette. That is why the chefs get asked this
| question.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You'd posit wrong. The craft is getting the texture right.
| Managing the heat, how much to beat it, when to add salt,
| etc. Chefs don't get asked the question to find out how good
| it tastes, and in fact, most of their score can be derived
| just by watching them.
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