[HN Gopher] On Craft ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-09-02 23:00 UTC)