3 ms·
That was also written before there were many commercially available tools. (Still a great book!) Perhaps tool specialist is more important today?
by mathattack 8y ago
That was also written before there were many commercially available tools. (Still a great book!) Perhaps tool specialist is more important today?
- was_boring 8y agoI believe a toolmaker on a team is still critically important. I have yet to see a team or organization that doesn't have a suite of (often poorly maintained) custom tooling that automates things together or provides functionality critical to the business.
- hrktb 8y agoInterestingly the more critical these tools are, the less maintained they will be. They often fall in the middle of everything, and there is no set team to handle them (“everyone’s responsible”). Then as they’re critical, someone can’t just take half an hour to do a quick fix, it must be reviewed (and no one actively wants to review it, as it’s not trivial and not their job —- cf “everyone’s responsible —-). Plus anyone succesfully fixing them will be flagged as a potential maintainer when everyone else is running away. Internal tooling in software companies is a beast in its own.
- shitgoose 8y agothe toolmaking, that is being discussed here, is not generic, but very specific to the business. tool specialists today are probably even more important, because "we" (collective IT industry) became carried away with frameworks and lost ability to solve simplest problems by hand (the infamous 'leftpad' comes to mind; or was it rightpad?). writing small, targeted, fast code that solves specific business problem is the lost art now.