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TJ Stankus
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wtfwasithinking

Writing and software development

I’m reading Stephen King’s On Writing and, as I expected, noticing some pretty direct parallels to software development. Here’s one: write the first draft with the door closed and the second draft with the door open. Translation: write the first one for yourself, and once you’ve got the gist of the story, rewrite it so that anyone can read it and feel like they own it.

In software, we call the second and subsequent drafts refactoring. So, to use King’s door metaphor, a software developer should crank the first one out, using code of his choosing. Once that first revision is complete, step back and look at it from the maintenance programmer’s perspective. Consider who the next person to look at this code and write it for them. Of course, we don’t crank out entire programs before we consider refactoring. We keep the cycles small, but the close door/open door metaphor stil works. I like it.

I’ll hopefully post more thoughts about this the further I get into the book.

Filed under  //   writing  
Posted February 15, 2009
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Stories from the past

This story and some great comments posted over at Signal vs. Noise reminds me of a story I wrote about my grandparents for a journalism class in college. I won’t go into detail here, maybe later.

A couple things stand out: ask old people questions about the war, the depression, whatever. When I did that assignment for my class, it showed me a side of my grandfather that I had never seen. He died soon thereafter and I was really grateful for the experience of interviewing him. Also, when you get someone who lived through WWII to start talking about it, you realize how much those few years defined their life. I have had the experience filtered for me through my grandfather, an American serviceman, and my grandmother, a Japanese citizen. While my grandfather’s stories were entertaining and had a happy ending (he lived to tell them) my grandmother essentially won’t talk about it. She’s let out bits and pieces of it to various family members, but for the most part she won’t go there. Too much pain.

Filed under  //   stories   writing  
Posted December 7, 2008
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In praise of melancholy

This great treatise on melancholia reminds me of a song I wrote about ten years ago called Describing Moldorf. Here it is for posterity’s sake:

Perfect choking action
both hands around my brain
contained, language fails me.

Good enough can always be
better
because life seems transcendent
and tends to drive me
inward, forward.

Complacent and satisfied
I’d feel so uninspired,
deflated, dead.
That happiness scares me,
threatens my being.

One inside my head.
Peel it back the other way.
Distance won attenuates.

Filed under  //   writing  
Posted September 19, 2008
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