Not something specifically about software, but a tale that gets to the heart of what we do.
Ben Halpern
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Which fictional story (book, movie, etc.) is the best allegory for software development?
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Oldest comments (61)
Back to the future, wildly wrong predictions, crazy tech and it seems to have no sense of timescales.
This is cheating, but "How to Fight a Hydra" by Josh Kaufman was written explicitly to be an allegory that is meant to describe "how to do hard things" (of which writing software definitely applies!)
It's meant to mimic the feel of a story from really old works (like the Odyssey, etc) but is significantly shorter, and much more to the point. I highly recommend it!
It's okay. I just listened to it on Audible a week or two ago. I expected to get a bit more out of it, but it's an interesting and quick read.
This is a book where I also think the audio book experience is probably different than the "in hand" reading experience as well. The way the book is laid out and split up adds to the experience I think, so that may be why it was an underwhelming audio book :)
"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert M. Pirsig. It talks about the nature of "Quality", the beauty of craft, and the relationship between people and technology.
It's covered more in this context in the Greater than Code podcast episode: 123: BOOK CLUB! Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
ex-machina(movie) . Makes you wonder about what is ethical in AI and how we handle our interactions in future.
Not to mention that true AI - were one able to create what is essentially an artificial consciousness - isn't really ethically compatible with prior models of obsolescence. I mean, what do you do when your previous-generation AI has reached the end of its useful life? Is retiring it equivalent to killing something?
The Room.
I think this answer is self-explanatory.
Hackers. If your day-to-day doesn't resemble Crash Override's, you're doing something egregiously wrong.
...and you have a hard time not laughing at it.
I was going to say The Phoenix Project until I saw the qualifier. Instead, I think I'll go with My Side of the Mountain. The level of exploration and progressive improvement just captures so much of greenfield development.
Jurassic Park
"Must go faster!"
Well, if you accept some of the inanities of interacting with project managers and product owners as things that fall into this category, I've got one for ya:
Catch-22.
Book, 1970 movie adaptation or the recent Amazon Streaming adaptation? All three are absurd, but the 1970s adaptation is less grim than either the book or the Amazon version.
Ouch. That's a great question actually. I'm not sure if I'd call the recent Amazon adaptation necessarily grim, but it was definitely weighty especially towards the end.
But great question because I was having this exact debate with a coworker, I honestly don't know which adaptation I love more, they've both got a certain brilliance about them.
To me, the 1970 movie was too short to adequately make the transition from "merely absurd" to "grim". You don't have quite have that "litany of absurdities" feeling (especially if you binge the series) from the movie that you do in the streaming version.
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy...Always.
Nobody has suggested Moby Dick?
One peron's obsession that goes too far.
I've definitely seen my share of devs chasing their white whale 😄
i would really love to write an anime on software development
For us poor sods who don't work at cushy startups with foosball tables and free lunch, Office Space is still dead on. (Despite the movie being about software developers, I'm claiming it's not "specifically about software" as much as it's about the culture around office life in America.)
Spoiler alert:
For foofy startups, Office Space is still dead on.
Mike Judge is a national treasure
I've spent most of my career in consulting. I've gotten to work at a lot of organizations of varying sizes and across many industries. Every place is broken – you just have to find th brokenness that's easiest to deal with (one of the benefits of shorter-term consulting is you only have to tolerate a given brand of brokenness for a limited period of time and, when you're just about to lose your mind with the current brand, you can console yourself with "it's only more days/weeks/months"
Or Dilbert...
Replace "Cloud" with AI/ML/DL/Blockchain and you have the modern business people.
Even better: modern business people that don't quite understand that "correlation" and "causation" are two very different things ...and that, while AI and ML can be damned good at finding the former, they sorely struggle with the latter.
Groundhog Day. 😁
The Malazan Book of the Fallen.
Whatever you're doing matters, but not that much as there are so many things going on that you're not involved with (but still impact on you)