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Discussion on: Dev Is Not Construction. It's Medicine.

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qpgmr profile image
Daniel Gross

Well, I know I'm quite late to the party, but I recently stumbled upon one of your pieces, and I think they are very insightful.

I can resemble many of your ideas - I see myself more a craftsman than an architect or a doctor.

Why? Because craftsmen plan and build things. Like a carpenter plans and builds a new table or a cupboard, he/she can also repair an old chair - using his craft, tools and sometimes replacement parts.

And everything you find another type of chair, table or cupboard - sometimes similar, sometimes not.

And even if the carpenter builds a new house after a plan an architect did - the wood is always unique, the grounds are unique and the building teams is unique - so you will never build two identical houses - each and every house is a unique piece of work, like every new software is.

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Adam Nathaniel Davis

Yep - totally agree! Maybe I fall upon the medicine analogy because I'm often called on to diagnose and treat issues that exist in current apps. But I don't disagree with you at all. When you're building a new app from scratch, many people use the analogy of building a house. But I don't like that analogy. Because most houses nowadays are built from pre-existing architectural plans - basically, the building part of it is like putting together a kit. But the reality is that it's never as much like a "kit" as the client believes. There's always a lot more craftsmanship that goes into it. So, yeah... I totally agree with what you're saying.