Published on 10 October 2023.
This is what I’ve been up to in September 2023:
I wrote another devlog about my Raspberry Pi game console.
I watched Continued Learning: The Beauty of Maintenance - Kent Beck - DDD Europe 2020. What stuck in my mind was the metaphor that software development is like a swan. You can watch the beauty as it moves across the water. That represents the behavior of the software system. The features. But to make that happen, lots of things is going on under the surface that you don’t see. The swan paddles its feet (?) to go forward, poop comes out, it is messy. That is the structural changes needed in software to make the features possible. Refactoring.
I started reading Modern Software Engineering by Dave Farley. So far, I’ve gotten a few useful ideas out of it.
When I started reading about software engineering, Alan Kay came to mind again. I revisited some of his talks, trying to find things about science and engineering in particular. I admire Alan’s work, and I also like the Agile concepts that Dave talks about. I’m interested in figuring out if they contradict, or if I can happily continue to admire both.
When reading about Alan Kay again, Bret Victor came to mind, and I watched his talk The Humane Representation of Thought. I feel like his and Kay’s work are worth revisiting from time to time. For inspiration for better ways of doing things. And for inspiration of things to try to do differently.
What is Rickard working on and thinking about right now?
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