Programming craftsmanship

 The article below is a digest from "Programming is not a craft" (courtesy to the author Dan North.)

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Software Craftsmanship risks putting the software at the center rather than the benefit the software is supposed to deliver, mostly because we are romantics with big egos. Programming is about automating work like crunching data, processing and presenting information, or controlling and automating machines.

They understand software development is a skill, in fact a whole portfolio of skills: understanding and modeling a problem domain, understanding programming languages, libraries, paradigms and idioms, choosing which to apply in a given situation, learning and understanding algorithms, mastering the "path to production" (build, deployment, release), monitoring and availability, process automation, Lean theories of supply, production and product development, utility and cloud computing, concurrency and parallelism, and so on.

The oft-quoted figures of tenfold increase in productivity of expert versus novice programmers are wrong by orders of magnitude in my experience. A really great programmer (and I've been lucky enough to work with a handful over the years) can out-perform a doing-it-for-the-money programmer by orders of literally hundreds, delivering in hours or days what would take an average developer weeks or months.

It seems to me the most successful programmers I've encountered don't craft software; they write software in order to move information around, in order to get something done. Information is the real deal – the software just defines the space that it moves around in. For those programmers, success is about getting information from point A where it's currently languishing to point B where it's going to actually be useful, as quickly and effectively as they can. Success in a UI is about rendering or capturing exactly the information that will be useful – no less and certainly no more – in a succinct, obvious way. The software is incidental, a detail, hidden away in the wings, and it is ultimately entirely disposable.