Arieh's Weblog

As time passes by, the experiences of the job (software development, architecture, hacking, learning) continue strengthening the image of software development being part craft, part art.
(I would not want to omit Don Knuth's Programming as Art Turing Award lecture.)

As good craftsmen, we are expected to have a toolbox, on which we can find multiple tools (the set of languages, tools, methodologies, etc.) that we have accumulated over time, from which to choose the appropriate one for the task at hand.

Keeping up-to-date with the technologies is one of the defining factors to keep that toolbox useful, and ourselves relevant.

The context of art is manifested - as mentioned in the reference above - in the precision and elegance of fitting these (the well known tools and techniques - the craft) to the problem domain ....

With the incredible proliferation of new technologies, we find ourselves faced with trying to assimilate a large (and growing) amount of resources from which we would benefit of their addition to that (virtual) toolbox.

We therefore, end up along a specialization tack that potentially limits our horizons.We should be careful to keep ourselves open, and track developments in directions/areas that may not seem obvious.

Learning how to utilize those tools/resources from our toolbox for their own sake is good, but putting them to use in the context of the problem we are trying to resolve should be the scenario under which we are expanding our craft.

As technology is not going to stop evolving any time soon, my best advice to all of us is to continue improving ourselves as craftsmen, while at the same time doing what we can to build those pieces of art that are the software that we create.