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I’m a developer but have built a side gig renovating 100 year old homes. My partners in the effort are a carpenter who can do pretty much anything and a former
by mattrp 7y ago
I’m a developer but have built a side gig renovating 100 year old homes. My partners in the effort are a carpenter who can do pretty much anything and a former machinist who can take anything apart and put it back together (whether that’s a motor or a house). He recently completed a vr6 engine swap on a gen-ii golf. What the article mentions about the parallels with the auto body shop and agile are true. We don’t intentionally run it this way it just organically works like this. Over two years of doing this we’ve had numerous conversations about how the mind of a carpenter or fabricator is very much like the mind of a developer. You have to visualize the problem, evaluate multiple approaches and then ultimately work uninterrupted to create the solution.
- itronitron 7y agoCurious to know how often you or the carpenter replace mud sills on 100 year old homes.
- mattrp 7y agoHah, haven’t seen any myself but I’ll ask him. Why do you ask?
- itronitron 7y agosince the mud sill connects the house to the foundation (on a wood-framed house at least) it is often the most heavily damaged and awkward to repair, but if it is squared away properly then later work is built on the same ground truth. I am wondering what the analog for mud sills is within software, i.e. what do you have to get right at the start to ensure that your later work won't need to be reworked?
- code_biologist 7y agoData modelling. The data model pervades any given piece of software, so it's hard to change. If there are mistakes in it, you will see workarounds all throughout a codebase.
- mattrp 7y agoI’d agree with this. All the action in a house happens in the basement. It’s here where you see the mechanicals and all the wiring and plumbing decisions. It’s where you see if there’s water or radon leaks or structural issues. And it’s the part of the house least understood by the user / typically it’s a scary/foreign place to be. So yeah that sounds just like the data model!
- gdubs 7y agoDo you have a blog or an instagram? I’d love to read more about your work; I imagine many others here would too.
- mattrp 7y agoI never thought of that.. you know another way Reno’s are like software... you often have to debug other people’s work. Simple example, in one house there were wide door jams that met in the middle of the top of the door frame. Why would anyone do that. Turns out, you take the two long pieces and the two short pieces and you get two 96” pieces... answer, they didn’t want to buy a third piece of lumber. Now to tell you how really stupid this is, you buy lumber at Home Depot by the foot and they even have a saw station in the store for you to trim pieces and even if you didn’t trim there you can bring the unused portion back and get a credit. Now... I would bet most software devs on here have seen code equivalents at least as dumb as that. It’s been fun doing this but it’s been cool to see just how many parallels there are.. don’t get me started on the 1x, 10x, 100x analogues!