[HN Gopher] The Age of Software Artisans
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The Age of Software Artisans
Author : jairojair
Score : 39 points
Date : 2024-09-21 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jairojair.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jairojair.com)
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I would like to thank this website for reminding me to drink
| water.
| jairojair wrote:
| You're welcome!
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I have attempted, in vain, to bring this kind of thinking into
| the companies and teams that I have worked with. They don't want
| it.
|
| And in interviews, no one wants a Software Artisan. The cynic in
| me says that it's because people want the job security of the
| typical bullshit position and don't want anyone upsetting that.
| Swizec wrote:
| The problem with hiring artisans is that most companies need a
| Honda Civic not an Enzo Ferrari.
|
| If they hire an artisan it's just going to be frustrating for
| everyone involved. The business will pay more than the value
| received and wonder wtf and the artisan will be bored out of
| their mind looking for fun projects to do.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| McDonalds isn't looking for a chief.
| invalidlogin wrote:
| Chef?
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Companies don't need software artisans. They need replaceable
| people who can do the job until they run out of investor's
| money.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Artisans don't scale.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Agreed (in fact my profile claims I do artisanal software :-)
|
| But I go further - software is a form of literacy, and everyone
| should learn to code, just as at some point we thought "hey laws
| are written down, novels are great, policy manuals and
| international letters help, let's teach the peasents to read" and
| all of a sudden we have working class people going to university
| and discovering things like Relativity and Covid vaccines.
|
| Software is literacy and we will all benefit when we can run /
| examine our society through it.
|
| Book to follow
| vijucat wrote:
| Artisan is not a bad metaphor. Take furniture. There's a place
| for IKEA, and there's a place for expensive, hand-crafted
| Scandinavian furniture.
|
| https://www.scandinaviastandard.com/this-is-why-that-sofa-is...
| jairojair wrote:
| you get it! I think the exactly same way.
| herval wrote:
| where in the analogy does social software fit?
| andai wrote:
| Are you referring to that article about software that serves
| a small local community?
|
| I can't remember the name of the author but there was an
| interesting article about this, I think from some college or
| university in New York, talking about some examples of
| software that was set up at specific locations on the campus
| for specific purposes, and explaining how they wouldn't have
| worked as an online global thing.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Purdue Pharma.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Laravel has been using it for, what, a decade now?
|
| https://laravel.com
| andsoitis wrote:
| > there's a place for expensive, hand-crafted Scandinavian
| furniture.
|
| And then there's Italian craftsmanship https://artemest.com/
| interstice wrote:
| My 10,000 hours are well behind me and I build web apps a bit
| like this. Previous jobs are like a shed full of parts that will
| get 60% of the way there, and the rest is making a couple of
| custom parts and a lot of fettling. Sometimes I build a table
| from scratch just to remind myself I can.
| lttlrck wrote:
| At what layer of abstraction are you no longer an artisan? Or
| doesn't it matter?
|
| It's a nice "label" but it's a bit murky what it means the
| farther away from machine code (the raw materials) you get. Are
| you an artisan if you use an IDE?
|
| I do enjoy the sentiment however.
| skydhash wrote:
| I think it all depends on amount of care you put in the human
| aspect of the software. Does it solve a specific need for a
| person you can name, or the stories are all about imaginary
| characters and generic persona. Crafting requires empathy and
| the realization that this will be used by and for people, and
| you want to make it easy for them (even if people means you as
| one person). And the promise to make it better the next time
| you're working on it or something similar.
| jairojair wrote:
| Good take!
| ok_dad wrote:
| Is woodworking valid with power tools or is the tool doing the
| art? What about a CNC in the workshop? I think it's all valid
| because the art is in the planning and resulting furniture.
| Same thing for coding. Even an LLM needs human creative input.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It depends purely on the level of snobbery you want to strive
| for.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| It's not snobbery, it's knowledge and craft. You depend on
| the transfer of that knowledge from one generation to the
| next.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| You know what an artisan is though. There are varying degrees
| of artisans and craftsmen. Just extend that metaphor to
| programming. Layers of abstraction aren't infinite. I'd say
| metal on metal is a master craftsman in terms of programming.
| wsintra2022 wrote:
| Vim users only
| boricj wrote:
| Artisans can make objects out of raw material, but they can also
| take apart objects to reclaim raw material. Software engineering
| tends to only ever do the former, because traditional toolchains
| are a one-way street from source code to assembly code to object
| files to programs.
|
| That article rings very differently to me because of the tooling
| I've developed. With the ability to break apart programs into
| object files and reusing them to make new programs, I can do the
| latter. In a sense, using both pristine source code and second-
| hand binary code to make programs is as artisanal as software
| development can get.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| > break apart programs into object files and reusing them
|
| So, libraries?
| boricj wrote:
| No, it's actually ripping out bits from an executable and
| turning them into relocatable object files. The technical
| term I've come up with for this is delinking, although the
| decompilation community calls it binary splitting.
|
| Putting it another way, you can make libraries out of a
| program with this technique.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I sure hope we can get to a happier software harmony, of enjoying
| code and systems.
|
| One of the recurring trends thats cropped up is so called
| barefoot developers, folks just cobbling together some kind of
| task not for big industrial software with millions or even dozens
| of users, but just because it makes their lives or a small group
| of people's lives better.
|
| Maggie Appleton recently followed up with a post saying that
| these are the folks ML/LLMs might best be able to help. To get
| them their stuff. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029
| https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
|
| But I also have this feeling, that almost all the webdev we do is
| artisanal handcraft as is. We hand author endpoint after endpoint
| for our objects even though there's this high degree of
| similarity across endpoints; authorize/validate the request, do
| the thing in the db, return it to the user.
|
| Part of me is sick as shit of just how artisanal software is; it
| stinks like rot that we keep cranking out more piles of code for
| each entity & as we intricate/complicate/embellish each
| entity/resource. We so rarely have broader high level systems
| where we've escaped from hand crafting web server middle tier
| glorified-translators of a very basic 3-tirr client-server-db
| architecture.
|
| I just want companies to pay me to tell them how much less they
| could do, if they let me PoC their system in something ordered &
| higher order, such as Hasura. Like CORBA, the UML world also has
| great scorn as unmaintainable, but again it's like, those folks
| felt on to something amazing & mighty & we have _immense_
| unsurvivor anti-bias, we are pat & confident that this tower of
| babel built too high & all future towers too will fall & that the
| effort is folly.
|
| But man, the chaos & lines of code we have been creating as an
| industry is just so unnecessary & so out of control.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| That's what I've been working towards, even despite recent
| trends.
| jumploops wrote:
| Everyone is saying that LLMs will kill programmers.
|
| The author here has the right idea, and the correct historical
| context to back it up.
|
| Generative AI will 10x (at least) the number of people that
| program computers, but that programming will look different than
| it does today.
|
| Gone are the semicolons and curly braces we're so used to, just
| like BEQ and JMP before them.
|
| Truly gone? No, the next Rollercoaster Tycoon has yet to be built
| :)
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