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Tech: Why Buildings Do Not Have Gargoyles
Sun, 20 Nov 2005

This posting could just as easily be called 'Why do all websites have to be black on white?' but its easier for people to wonder 'Why do all buildings have the same sized door?' In software, there is a transition going on.. a battle in the trenches between the software artist and the software engineer - a battle thats been going on as long as the industry has existed and that has been waged in probably every other industry since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Stated simply - the artist, the cowboy, the path-finder must be replaced by the machine, a process, standards - the quality controlled English-style boiled down variation of itself. While there are pros and cons to both sides of the war, you can be sure of one thing - no one likes to lose a battle.

Early on in any technology there are those who blaze the way, who despite the difficulties of treading new paths will wrestle forward and make something. These first attempts are of course rough around the edges - mud huts with thatched rooftops, but nonetheless something to be proud of for someone had to claw their way there. Later, others will follow in the footsteps of these inventors and build upon their knowledge to create better and more advanced things until at some point the technology (assuming it is desirable and successfull) will become standardized and cleansed so that joe-public can depend upon it. The technology must become an appliance - something that works. It doesn't have to be good, but it has to be good enough.

There was some training last week which had a lot of very good things to say, but one that struck me as odd was the principle that an output from a process has to be good enough - to meet the consumers expectations, to meet service level agreements, to beat its competition etc.. but that it should not exceed its requirements. Something that exceeds its requirements may well cost more to support, or perhaps costs more to build ("over engineered"), or set expectations too high and thus set up for a subsequent fall. A very good example was set on the table - if a telephone service excelled once in awhile, but also did not work all of the time, it would be a failed service. It has to always function, and functioning over-well doesn't really matter to anyone. The customer does not care about being delighted once in awhile - he cares about being satisfied all the time.

So you see there is this transition - from the early artist - the carpenter who makes a house for an individual and in doing so customizes that home for its own occupant, taking pride in his work with carvings around the door frame or adding artistic flares - gargoyles around the rooftop or keystone as it were. A home developer nowadays will plop down hundreds of homes in each development, each quality controlled just enough to match the building code (the city's 'service level agreement') and no more. The doors will be the same size because it reduces cost (mass produce doors) and is guaranteed to please (tall and short people both fit through) -- but there are no flares around the doors. There is no art. No pillars with intricate carvings.

No Cathedral of Notre Dame. In the last hundred years, has any building been made with so much pride and devotion that it stands as a work of art? Perhaps a few here or there, as bragging pieces by some archtecture firm, but few made to be beautiful and functional.. by someone building out of pride.

Software is in this transition, and rightly so. Many would suggest software is a young profession (by comparison to others such as civil engineering), but I'd still like to point out that software has been written en masse for more than 30 or 40 years and yet we still cannot produce code that is truly cross platform with native look and feel and fast performance. We still struggle with should it be java (screwy native look and feel, sometimes slow, weird JVMs) or C (only truly portable language, but hard to develop in) or even pure javascript (all applications running in a web browser, with oddities by platform and not particular fast, though enforcing open codebase). How is it so much time has passed and yet we've not standardized the bolts? Some would blame the lack of certifications in the field, but how could anyone sensibly get a certificatoin for a technology that will out-dated by the time you get the certification?

As an industry we do need to produce more reliable software that the average joe can just use, but I truly am afraid of that push towards losing the joy of development - to producing something that is only good enough and does not impress. You see, I'm still the artist - I want people to be delighted and enjoy their experience. I want them to have the gargoyles - regardless fact they might lose 10 seconds learning time seeing something slightly different. We must stick to the standards so tall people can enter through the door standing, but why shouldn't they see a fountain in the anteroom?

This post came around for many reasons; I've got a block of quotes but need to find the paper I scrawled them on.. but consider:

Each week, I get complaints mailed to me because the Codejedi website is white on black with blue highlightes; it is 'hard to read', 'hard to print' (for braindead browser applications) or 'different' - and while it is all of these things to some people, it is also a little fun and partially done 'for me'. If my company was purely about money it would be very different (and maybe I'd make some ;), but instead I run my company the way I think others should be run - with some sense of fun and mystery, doing things niftily and cheaply. So its still white and black and lacks popup banner ads, which I'm sure you appreciate.

I had to work on a MSWord document with some other people; one guy had a one year newer version of Word than I, so I couldn't open the files he sent. Thats the result of over-engineering and forgetting to take pride in development.

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