the ‘bee log

Jeremy is right, I didn’t anticipate the level of reaction on my ALT.NET post. I think this is a common experience in the blogosphere. You end up putting a lot of stuff out there that you pour lots of time into and they do mediocre. The thing you just fire off in 15 minutes is what ends up stimulating the most conversation. By-and-large I was surprised people latched on to the idea because there’s not much really new there other than a bit of a pithy name and a summarization. Recall my post starts as a reaction to Scott Bellware’s post and he’s been ranting about this stuff for a long time.  

By “ALT” I really didn’t mean “you’ve gotta be a cool kid.” I understand, though, the “ALT” part has that cachet. I know I personally think that all these people walking around me in the East Village wearing skinny jeans and rocking fashion mullets look like assholes. Largely I have the same reaction to similar fashions in the software world. At least those that work in a way similar to fashion being pushed by companies and mainstream media. My meaning was less about fashion and more about ripping out the vendor-supplied feeding tube. Let’s get back to practice and technique folks.

Sure lots of the stuff ALTernative to business as usual is “so 1994” or “so 1979” but it doesn’t change the fact that there are ideas we should be incorporating right now and, for the loud mouthed, write about, experience, encourage and promote. No matter how old an idea it’s usually new to someone…

Jeremy might not be a Pearl Jam fan, but they’ve got a song describes the when-utility-becomes-empty-style phenomenon: “Corduroy.” I bought and wear this (Corduroy) jacket because it’s comfortable, warm, has lots of pockets and I could afford it and now that I’m a hit you can buy a replica at Barney’s for $1200. Let’s think about Eddie Vedder for awhile. Sure he’s one of the founding voices of the “grunge movement,” what was it about Pearl Jam that was ground breaking? Really you’ve got shades of Jim Morrison in that voice mashed up with a self-identified homage to Neil Young in the melody and song-writing departments, yet he and the band are considered ground breaking.

That’s a good analogy for how new ground gets broken in software development. So much of what we adopt as new practice is either a composite or incremental improvement on what’s come in the past. We wouldn’t have BDD without TDD. We wouldn’t have TDD without the idea of Unit Tests. Ideas beget ideas and it’s the community or the act of shopping things around and dogfooding your theories against the experience and thoughts of others that makes things surface, gain traction, and improve the world order. Again I can take it back to the grunge metaphor. Pearl Jam got attention partially because of Nirvana, Soundgarden, etc. In development and music alike it takes a village.

I could expand on the comparison lots more – Pearl Jam is to NUnit as Creed is to MS Test — but I’ll stop here for the time being.

Like Ayende, I also didn’t anticipate people would jump right to the focus on tools, especially considering the bolded “it’s not about tools” part. That and partly what I’m saying is that healthy tension and a measure of dissatisfaction is what it’s all about: if we all become fat on what we’ve had, the ways of old, and what we’re being fed, well, that’s not good. I constantly want to bring new juice and ideas into the mix. It’s a big part of what attracts me to this business. 

Oh well, people hear/read what they want to hear/read. We, as developers, always talk about “capturing intent.” I thought the post was relatively succinct and fairly well-crafted, but here you have an example in the wild of how capturing intent is difficult in the English language, never mind “made-up” programming languages with extremely limited vocabularies. That said I think some of the reactions were relevant if you take them as instances of a class or personal testimonial.