Conversation

The Linux story hasn’t been properly told afaik by Linus or anyone else. Linus’ views are only known piecemeal to a broader audience via his random rants on listservs etc. Most major open source languages etc are only known via scattered forum discussions.
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I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve shared Yegge’s rant with clients when discussing problems with software orgs… and it’s only available at all because it leaked by accident 🙄
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It says something that Joel Spolsky’s stuff is among the most cited, and it’s great, but hardly based on the world’s most critical software stack stories. I’m sure is great and Stack Overflow is a huge contribution, but it’s amazing that we know more about them than Google.
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Broader point I’m making is that software discourses in public are curiously ahistorical. Overly dependent on analytical writing on concepts and insights and theories (“this is the seminal piece on microservices!”), and far too few full stories told in public. Mostly outtakes.
Replying to
Software is eating the world and we basically don’t collectively know this most important story of contemporary history *at all* in a public way. No wonder the rest of society gets almost everything about it wrong almost all the time. Only way you learn it is grapevine chatter.
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This is dangerous. And only scratches the surface. I’ve only even mentioned like 2% of the world’s mission critical software. This is the charismatic megafauna stuff, and we don’t even have a view of that.
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I’m not a sw guy, but most of my consulting is with tech companies that write big, complex stacks of sw as a core activity. And all the business books are kinda useless, still talking about Southwest Airlines or Toyota. The only source is this case-study desert, blogs, and gossip
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If you’ve ever played a key role in a big software story and are free to tell it… I really strongly urge you to do so. Just tell the story straight and raw from start to finish. Don’t bother trying to extract a general theory of software out if it. That actually detracts.
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I think this may be part of the problem. Software naturally requires you to forget the story and go for the general theory. So when veterans step back to write and reflect, they tend to make up codified theories and frameworks.
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You know what would make a great podcast? Line up famous veterans of software and being them on not once, but like 10-15 times in a row, and have them simply tell the war stories of their career in chronological order, one story per episode, while asking clarifying questions.
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Basically tease out the first draft of the book they have inside as a serialized audio book. Your guest can simply take their transcripts and edit them into the book version. An “as told to” production factory of software war stories. Maybe even help publish them and take a cut.
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You’d need to be literate enough yourself in software engineering to be an intelligent audience and prompter, but cede the spotlight. Like the Inside the Actor’s Studio guy James Lipton. He almost made himself a piece of furniture.
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Brooks: “show me your code and hide your tables and I’ll understand nothing. Show me your tables and hide your code and I’ll understand everything” Unreasonable effectiveness of war stories
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Replying to @vgr
Most tech management blog posts are all moral, no story
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