Link: The Duct Tape Programmer
This is a great Article I found on Joel On Software. In this article Joel writes about the concept of the Duct Tape Programmer. This is the programmer who gets things done and doesn’t feel the need to show off their software architect skills by over-engineering software. The Duct Tape Programmer is similar to the fictional developer I called “Jim” in my post A Tale of 2 Developers.
Joel’s rant is truly entertaining and accurate as well. Here’s an example:
“You see, everybody else is too afraid of looking stupid because they just can’t keep enough facts in their head at once to make multiple inheritance, or templates, or COM, or multithreading, or any of that stuff work. So they sheepishly go along with whatever faddish programming craziness has come down from the architecture astronauts who speak at conferences and write books and articles and are so much smarter than us that they don’t realize that the stuff that they’re promoting is too hard for us.”
I highly value the concept of the practical programmer who writes solid code, regardless of the newest programming fad. Give both articles a read, then come back and tell me your thoughts on the matter.
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4 Responses to “Link: The Duct Tape Programmer”
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This is great advice, and I’m a big fan of everything Joel Spolsky writes. He always seems to be talking about some problem I personally experienced. Thanks for reminding me to re-read both of these articles (yours and his).
At this point, I’ve read a lot of books, blogs, and articles about software development. What I like most about your blog is that it focuses on the business software development process – I haven’t really found any good books which do that (and there are only a few other blogs that seem to focus on it specifically). A lot of the stuff I’ve found written out there focuses instead on shrink-wrap software or component/library development, which is usually not really the sort of thing I am doing (at least not in the earlier stages of a new “product”).
A successful blog needs unique, useful content that interests the readers
Having good content can only get you so far unless you also provide a good atmosphere to comment in
LOL i love these things!
star for you!
: )