lesscode.org

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