A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)

Slightly OT, but I enjoyed the discussion about (physical building) construction in the book "the Checklist Manifesto". In The Mythical Man Month, Brooks advocates the use of something like the "master builder" model for software. It turns out that in actual (physical building) construction, the master builder model is no longer used, because the construction process has become much too complex to be understood by a single person. Instead, in construction, they use a system of checks to ensure that…

Stone cathedrals (the ones still standing, anyhow) were built by generations of skilled craftspeople guided by a self-perpetuating hierarchy. The hierarchy had access to, and the craftspeople had the benefit of, ways of extracting wealth from the economy. The availability of unlimited resources allowed them to cover for plenty of mistakes. Sure, the cathedral structures look elegant and eternal. That's because time favors the stable ones. The other ones fell down long ago. It's the same reason that the orbits…

Things seem to be getting even worse, and as I hate to iterate on all the points often repeated on HN (the loss of older industry best practices, CV-driven development, bloated FAANG departments, the issues of funding OSS, etc.), I just want to notice one thing: Most developers and architects seem to have lower and lower confidence in what is technically achievable without some complex dependency web, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As believing something is possible is a…

While the architecture, quality and general decisions made in many (even majority) of FOSS projects can be called into question, this piece makes it sound like this would not happen in projects with 'professional' developers. The horror shows I have witnessed and had to work with inside some of the companies that have employeed me over the last 15 years have been much worse than anything I have come accross in reasonably large and active FOSS projects. The Peter Principle…