lesscode.org

I ride the industry analysis firms and print publications pretty hard about the lack of playing time given to dynamic languages and simple technologies. It is perhaps more constructive to praise the ones that have shown an honest interest in these technologies. Here’s a partial list:

• O’Reilly ONLamp is the only regular publication (online or off) that I am aware of that is dedicated to increasing awareness of LAMP and friends.

• O’Reilly has also published consistently great books on dynamic languages, Apache, Linux, BSD, etc.

• Dr. Dobb’s Journal sponsors the weekly Python URL, which is performed by actual real members of the Python community (Simon Brunning and Cameron Laird). I’m not sure but I don’t believe this makes it into their print publication.

• IBM developerWorks has published a significant number of Perl, Python, and Ruby related material. Although, I personally dislike the tone of most of these articles as they sometimes suggest that these languages are just for kiddie stuff. David Mertz’s Charming Python column is really very good.

I’m sure there has to be more out there. What are they?

Also, in case you weren’t aware, computer books and print publications aren’t doing very well. Next time your at the bookstore or browsing around on Amazon, consider picking up that O’Reilly Python book you’ve been meaning to buy for a year now, or maybe one of the new books on Rails.

I’m glad to see that there’s been a healthy amount of interest in the site and concept thus far. I want to talk a bit about scope because a majority of the questions seem to be coming from that direction.

A comment from David O’Hara:

I’ve been reading some of the links in your “About” and am quite curious about your ideas and philosophies on design. Hopefully, there will be some forthcoming posts on them. hint hint

Absolutely. Although, I think it will be more like relaying existing ideas and philosophies that have come about organically that I’ve been lucky enough to observe rather than anything I’ve personally sat down and figured out myself. Great systems are grown, not designed.

I can’t find the quote at the moment but I’d like to paraphrase Clay Shirky,

I’m a hopeless anti-visionary - I find that when I concentrate too heavily on what might happen in the future, I miss what’s working right now.

That’s 90% of this site’s premise. We have, at this very moment, a whole slew of great technologies that have come about organically through years of field experience that are being ignored and brushed aside by a large portion of the IT community because they are:

1. Simple
2. Not designed (in the Cathedral style)

In fact, you might consider lesscode.org an experiment to see how far we can push the concepts put forth in Shirky’s Situated Software combined with the theory that great software is evolutionary and not intelligently designed.

What happens all to often in collaborative peer development is that we find excellent ways of doing things but since there’s rarely an “expert” employed to evangelize and formalize these concepts or a PR department to prepare a press release, the concepts never reach the larger community mainstream or are perceived as being “unprofessional”. We need to turn that thinking around.

Many believe we need simply to adopt the PR and evangelism techniques of the established industry but that’s a mistake, IMO, and attempts to do so have failed in the past. There has to be a better way, and I think forward looking companies like Redmonk, Propylon, and 37signals are blazing that trail in different areas. They are not trying to adjust their radically different models to the established industry, they’re forcing the established industry to adjust to their model and they can because they know their model is better.

So I think the first step is to admit that our system of values are really very different from those of the established industry and to stop trying to pretend otherwise. Instead of trying to blend in, we should be distinguishing ourselves and doing a better job of explaining why we make the technology decisions we do. Because, I have to tell you, right now the majority of decision makers (in corporate IT at least) believe that J2EE (or whatever it’s called now) and .NET are the only platforms capable of producing “real” software. But don’t blame them, that’s what they’ve been told - we haven’t been vocal enough in rebutting the industry story.

If we’re going to make a run at this, we need to accept and state confidently that our practices are superior in many ways and then start putting some more definition around why that’s so. We need to bring the industry’s values in line with our in own. In many cases, this means convincing decision makers that values like buzz, “enterprise class”, and promised capability should be replaced with values like simplicity, strong team dynamics, and proven capability.

I really need to learn how to end a post; after two years of doing this, I’ve still not gotten the hang of it. But I’d like to leave you with some more bits of recent philosophy that I think are interesting and relevant:

• No more nails
• Frameworks should be extracted.
• Working code attracts people who want to code. Design documents attract people who want to talk about coding.
• Radical Simplification

I’m pleased to announce an initial version of Buildutils, a set of extension commands to Python’s standard Distutils.

The goal of Buildutils is to distill various development procedures into a set of simple commands under the normal Distutils idiom. All commands are invoked and configured using standard Distutils techniques.

The types of commands available are similar to those that you might throw together with make. The advantage over make is that the commands are written in Python and can use project metadata to provide intelligent defaults for most commands. For example, the announce command can be executed as follows, without any additional configuration beyond your normal setup.py:

pbu announce

The announce command uses the metadata available for the project to put together an announcement email and send it to a set of mailing lists. You can tweak the way the command works by overriding defaults in setup.cfg or on the command line.

I’d really love to see community involvement with this project. I think we can be fairly liberal with adding new and experimental commands. For more information, including a User’s Guide, Command Reference, and installation info, see the Buildutils Project Page.

For a really long time now I’ve wanted to get my development related projects, essays, and other ramblings into a more coherent place on the web. At the same time, I’ve been thinking a lot about this “movement” (for lack of a better word) that I’ve grown a small part of that is simplifying, humanizing, and opening up IT.

There’s a significant portion of the development community that’s just plain pissed off at the status quo and have begun pursuing radically different ways of building and delivering systems from what is now commonly accepted by the established industry. To our delight, we’re finding that There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom and that the next big thing in IT should really be making it smaller.

We’re also finding that this new-think will not be accepted by the mainstream analyst firms, tech publications, and vendor powerhouses on simple merit. Pimping the latest acronym from the latest vendor with the latest money is a much easier way of bringing in stupid amounts of cash than is trying to move an industry forward in providing real value to actual people. So screw you guys - your goals are in direct competition with those of my customers.

As you can see, I’m a little bitter… But I’m also excited - we’re assembling a stack of tools and techniques that are demonstrably superior and yet somehow much simpler than those of the mainstream past. We’re starting companies and controlling our future and it just feels right.

So I’m proud to announce that lesscode.org is open for business. It’s still a work in progress but here are my goals for the place:

• Advocate, communicate, and discuss the happenings of the less movement.

• Provide tools and resources for like minded individuals to collaborate on projects (subversion, mailman, trac, etc).

I’m also prepared to chase funding in the form of hosting, bandwidth, admin time, etc. should their be significant interest in the concept.

The site is getting there. I spent an hour or so skinning Trac. I have to say, whoever did the HTML for Trac did a really good job. It’s all very simple and you can tell they were anal about semantics, which makes my life a ton easier. I modified a small bit of the header.cs template but other than that, the redesign was done purely with CSS.

I’ll have to announce this place over at naeblis.cx/rtomayko/ but as of right now, it is imperative that I get shitfaced as soon as possible. 8)