This is a hard episode to summarize but Greg Wilson’s been on a decades-long quest to transform how we teach and talk about software design.
The ‘Beautiful Code’ book, and the Architecture of Open Source Applications series were part of his attempts to get us talking about software design.
Along the way, he hit some frustrations with the gaps between theory and practise and how comp sci teaching works and how dependant science is on programming literacy.
I like his perspective, that we should try to learn from real world examples. I think its harder than trying to learn from some made up tutorial, but he’s certainly made that easier with these books.
I am particularly intrigued by the comparison with architecture undergrads and the realization that software developers do not have an equally refined vocabulary to talk about designs and software design concepts.
These larger building blocks that you can reason in terms of that speed you up 10x w.r.t. getting lost in the weeds of arranging loops.
“Design patterns from the early 1990s are still as far as we’ve gone in terms of having a vocabulary for talking about why Nginx is more elegant internally than Apache”
But it’s also hard to do better since the only way to get better is with real-world practice. I don’t know what else to do other than be deliberate in the research of elegance.
This is a hard episode to summarize but Greg Wilson’s been on a decades-long quest to transform how we teach and talk about software design.
The ‘Beautiful Code’ book, and the Architecture of Open Source Applications series were part of his attempts to get us talking about software design.
Along the way, he hit some frustrations with the gaps between theory and practise and how comp sci teaching works and how dependant science is on programming literacy.
Let me know what you think.
Links to the books:
All of them are fantastic – I learned a lot from each one! I didn’t quite realize that Greg was involved in both projects
I like his perspective, that we should try to learn from real world examples. I think its harder than trying to learn from some made up tutorial, but he’s certainly made that easier with these books.
I enjoyed this episode, as usual. (Except the anecdote about the knitter, which made me hopping mad and want to throw stuff across the room.)
Yeah, the knitter story is so sad right? Thanks for listening. (and everyone else as well)
This was a excellent episode, Greg’s approach really resonated with me.
https://carpentries.org/ is a great idea
Thank you for another excellent episode @adamgordonbell!
I am particularly intrigued by the comparison with architecture undergrads and the realization that software developers do not have an equally refined vocabulary to talk about designs and software design concepts. These larger building blocks that you can reason in terms of that speed you up 10x w.r.t. getting lost in the weeds of arranging loops.
But it’s also hard to do better since the only way to get better is with real-world practice. I don’t know what else to do other than be deliberate in the research of elegance.
Really nice episode, great story!