Recently, Maxfield Pool from CodeSqueeze sent me an email about a new monthly feature he calls Developer Faceoff in which he pits two developers side-by-side for a showdown.
It’s an obvious attempt to gain readers via an appeal to vanity of the featured bloggers who have no choice to link to it. Brilliant! :)
Seriously, I think it’s a fun and creative idea, but I have no credibility in saying so because I’m obviously biased being featured alongside my longtime nemesis and friend, Scott Hanselman. So check it out for yourself.
Some of my answers were truncated due to the format so I thought it’d be fun to elaborate on a couple of questions.
5. Are software developers - engineers or artists?
Don’t take this as a copout, but a little of both. I see it more as craftsmanship. Engineering relies on a lot of science. Much of it is demonstrably empirical and constrained by the laws of physics. Software is less constrained by physics as it is by the limits of the mind.
Software in many respects is as much a social activity as it is an engineering discipline. Working well as a team is essential, as is understanding your users and how they get their work done so your software helps, rather than hinders.
Much of software is based on faith and anecdotal evidence. For example, do we have scientific evidence that TDD improves the design of code? Do we have empirical evidence that it doesn’t? Research is scant, in part because it’s extremely challenging to set up valid experiments. Much of software research focuses on retrospective research, the sort that sociologists do.
So again, back to the question. Crafting a sorting algorithm is engineering. Building a line of business app that delights all the users is an art.
8. What is the biggest mistake you made along the way?
My first year as software developer, I deployed a reset password feature to a large music community site. A week or so after we deployed, a child of a VP of the client (or maybe it was an investor, I can’t remember) complained she couldn’t get into her account and hadn’t received her new password.
I was “sure” I had tested it, but it turned out I hadn’t done a very good job of it. There was a bug in my code and a bunch of users were waiting around for a regenerated password that would never arrive.
Needless to say, my boss wasn’t very happy it and for a good while I tread lightly worried I’d lose my job if I made another mistake. In retrospect, it was a good thing to get such a big production mistake out of the way early because I was extremely careful afterwards, always triple checking my work.