Experience of Development Notepad

I keep coming up with notes and ideas for posts on the experience of development faster than I can write the posts themselves.

This page is where I’m keeping everything. The vast majority take and expand upon my conjecture and associated proposals about why it might feel as it does to work with code. They make a bunch of stuff explicit, so it might be worth taking a look at them if you’ve not already.

Ideas for Posts

• Mental castle-building. The toil, or ease, by which this happens. The “happy path”, and straying from that path. The wholly-mental aspects of this. Link this back to “models all the way down” an perhaps “fine wines”. Also, mutability? (see chat in SW Dev)
• The expression of the mental model “castles” into code, into syntax. Just thinking about the writing of the code for now, and joining it into the compilation-surprise loop. We can bring in different languages and their syntaxes / sharp edges here. We can also bring in the Virginia Woolf quotes. Thinking in the syntax. (Harvey Richardson? Chris Phelps?) The fit of language to thinking-style and problem space.
• The joy of using tools which fit well in your loop. “I once worked with Harvey. He seemed to be able to think in c-shell, sed and awk. He also had a highly controlled environment. Other people take as much joy in their tools and the expression of their castles into ascii code as Harvey did, with less excuse…”. TDD. Other emotions.
• The “happy path” (and straying from it)
• Writing vs reading code
• Usage of feedback loops (inc. history) - how this is a
• Flow
• Hell is other developers - The minds of others (there is already a need to understand the mind of the machine). Writing vs reading. (Previously we were thinking about the minds of the machine). Pair programming. System Metaphors and DDD
• Learning and XP of Dev
• Developer workspaces (and “why?”)
• TDD
• Pair programming
• Flow. Context-swapping
• Debugging
• Personal styles and preferences
• Interviews
• How to think about this yourself

Reading / Listening

• Happy Path Programming
• A Writers Diary by Virginia Woolf
• Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a portrait for Lucian Freud
• Test Driven Development: By Example by Kent Beck
• Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans
• The Programmers Brain

Notes & Puzzles

• How might I visualise this?