Entries tagged 'programming'

Writing software is fun. (For me. Your mileage may vary. But I am not alone in feeling this way.)

This means it is a particularly fraught field for exploitation.

A comparison I would make is to making music. Practically every musical biopic (or fictional version) features the part of the story where the artist (Ray, The One-ders, Elvis, The Dreams, Queen, The Pussycats, etc.) who is creating and/or performing music for their love of creating and performing comes under the influence of someone who sees the potential for money to be made. They have more experience in the business related to the craft, and they use that information asymmetry to exploit the artist.

The business of music has been around quite a bit longer than the business of writing software, and it is still messy and there are constant struggles and upheavals over the rights of artists, how to distribute the money when it gets made, and what sort of gatekeeping goes on within the business.

Seven years ago I pointed out that the games industry was having the same discussions about “crunch time” as 20 years before that. It’s always been a segment of the industry fed on the enthusiasm of people who think writing games is fun.

All of this to say, that as we enter another cycle of software licensing shenanigans in the open source world, I am interested, invested, and extremely tired.

Sometimes I just want to bang on the drums keyboard all day, share that with others, and forget that it is part of this complex ecosystem of people who are coming at it from different angles.

the new york times has an article about how the fast pace of innovation is creating mini-generations.

while the story focuses on the users of all these technologies, the part of it that is of more immediate interest to me is the makers, since i’m one of them. the craft of making computers do what you want is progressing at least as fast as their uses.

new languages, new techniques, new environments. there are people who stand aside and laugh at the reinvention they see, but i would not count myself among them. there are people in the thick of it that think the current new thing is the one that will change everything. i am not one of them, either. there are people who get caught up in an eddy, where what was once the new thing has become their only thing. they are the next generation’s cobol programmer.

i think i am becoming one of them. i don’t think i mind. i don’t code in my free time any longer. i am moving on in other ways. my value as a programmer is not in knowing the newest things.