Scott Leberknight's Weblog

Just got home several hours ago from the Reston No Fluff Just Stuff conference. It started on Friday and ended Sunday afternoon, and as usual was packed with high quality technical content and excellent speakers. I was too lazy to write any blog entries during the conference sesions, plus I probably would have gotten behind in the sessions trying to learn and write simultaneously! But over the next couple of days I'm going to try and write down descriptions of some sessions and conference highlights.

I'll start by mentioning the keynote that Dave Thomas (of the Pragmatic Programmers) gave on Friday night was really interesting. It was entitled "The Art in Programming" and talked about whether programming is art or engineering. He gave lots of really interesting examples of famous artists, showing their "sketches" and the final products. It was intriguing to see sketches made by Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and others as they tried to gain an understanding of a problem, and then see the final painting. The important point is that you cannot just start off doing the final product; you first have to try some things out, make some preliminary "sketches", figure out difficult parts of your problem before you can dive into creating the final product, whether it be software or a painting. He noted that in the software industry, though, developers are somehow expected to go straight to the final product without doing any sketches, without following "tracer bullets" to get closer to the target, without gaining a better understanding of their problem. This is exactly why most software projects fail. Many managers and the general culture in the software industry believes it is wasteful to do any "sketching" and that developers are supposed to be "professional" and "get it right the first time".

Another suggestion he made was the duality that without art, there is no engineering; while without engineering there is no art. I for one agree and enjoy the art part of software development just as much as the engineering part. It is really satisfying to start with a blank editor buffer, type some text, press compile, and then a program spring into existence which can perform all kinds of useful functions. I am in no way doing justice to Dave's presentation. Suffice it to say it was a great presentation. If you get the chance to see Dave speak, jump at the chance. He speaks regularly at the No Fluff conferences around the country.