Programmimg feels like writing news report

10 Apr 2018

Since I started working as software developer, friends and family often try to guess:

- you must deal with a lot of mathematics, right? I would never be able to do that …

Or

- I was never good at the exact sciences, I would never make a good programmer.

I’ve always considered myself an exact sciences guy, felt confortable at programming, and those kinds of statements never really bothered me. Until I recently tried to explain to a friend my work day routine.

She was surprised to hear I thought it looked a lot more with the rontine of a journalist writing a news report.

I told her some of the steps we take to solve a software problem (in a big company/project):

• talk with all interested parties and interview specialists,
• reasearch about what have already been written on that subject,
• choose between multiple possible approaches,
• spend a few hours in recluded typing, to
• finally submit a document to the appreciation of our peers (for code review).

The similarities between developing software ande writing news articles, to me are no coincidence, since they both seem to share this one common trait.

And our industry’s history can gives us a hint of what it may be.

Amongst the complex algorithimic challenges involving logic and performance, reading code with variables named as var1, var2 and var3 continues to be one of the thoughest.

Big projects succumb, teams fall apart, whole books get written because of this same issue.

No matter how fast and smart is the computer, people will still need to read the code.

Having never worked as a writer, my comparison is based on the feeling I have when coding, that I’m more concerned of writing for people then for the computer.

Making the computer do what we want is easy. Keeping a code base that can undertake changes in business rules and keep growing, in a team that will keep changing throughout the next few months (and years), seems to have less to do with computers and more with humam comunication.

PS: talking to the computer is easy thanks to the myriads of languages and frameworks available today. I particularly thank Ruby, Rails and git, most of the times.