Getting It Right

I have been thinking about this myself, and now Uncle Bob's new book - Clean Architecture, a Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design - plopped into my inbox, and I am relieved to find he is thinking about this too. I quote from him:

It doesn't take a huge amount of knowledge and skill to get a program working. But getting it right is hard.

In my experience, lots of things (including lots of programs) don't even get working - and thinking about getting it right, strikes most people as shear lunacy.

Now I must back up and explain how I got all this. I subscribe to the O'Reilly Safari service (for $40 a month) that gives me unlimited access to practically every software book written - plus lots of videos, and lots of other stuff. Anyone serious about software has to have this.

They sent me an email, saying I really had to have this book. I had never heard of Uncle Bob before, but he is one of the bright lights in the field. And now he is shining light my way also. 

The Impact of Design

I got this from an O'Reilly newsletter. This outfit is overflowing with ideas - and they spread the good word everywhere.

This one was The impact of design at Shopify. I don't even know what shopify is, but I could understand this:

Engineering is not the art of building devices; it’s the art of fixing problems. Devices are a means, not an end. Fixing problems means first of all understanding them — and since the whole purpose of the things we do is to fix problems in the outside world, problems involving people, that means that understanding people, and the ways in which they will interact with your system, is fundamental to every step of building a system.

I sure wish I had heard this back when I was working in Silicon Valley in the Nineties!