Summary of September, 2003

The posts of September, 2003 revolved mainly around the topics of code quality, constrained universes of expression, and software projects as scientific explorations.

I began this month with a retrospective post about complexity science and software development, about whether spontaneous alignment would be possible to achieve for a team of developers.

Another retrospective post the following day dealt with good versus bad code, in which I said that “software can’t be planned [because it’s] a dialogue with its users, with competing software, and with its programmers.” This was commented on in other weblogs:

• Comments to my post about good vs. bad code (of September 5)
• Another comment about good vs. bad code (of September 5)
• Planning and well-written code (my response; of September 6)

This month, I continued blogging about constrained universes of expression, but in moderation, as I decided the month before to let it simmer at the back of my head for a while. The following posts are mostly quotes of things I think would be relevant for CUEs, or short notes on new ideas:

• Patterns and sonnets (of September 6)
• Conceptual blending (of September 6)
• Haiku assumptions (of September 6)
• Constrained universes and role playing games (of September 9)
• CUEs and reality shows (of September 21)

Then I thought again about programmers as scientists:

• Software projects as scientific explorations (of September 7)
• Planning and estimation in “scientific” software projects (of September 8)

Related to this was a post from a few days later, about something I had read that several writers do: exploring instead of planning.

This month I also started a project of annotating Richard Gabriel’s Patterns of Software, which he released under a Creative Commons license. I converted the Foreword, the Preface, and the first two chapters—Reuse versus Compression, and Habitability and Piecemeal Growth—to HTML, and added a few annotations.

The end of the month saw a decrease in posts because I read a semiotics book in Swedish, and quoted heavily from it in my Swedish weblog.