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Do Digital Techniques Lead to Less Thinking About Process?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- OhMeadhbh 2y agoI was alive for the film -> digital camera transition. I was never anything close to a good photographer, but I tried. I read about composition, color theory, etc. and I tried to be inspired by great photographers. When I got a digital camera I just started taking image after image, selecting one of tens (rarely hundreds) of shots I really liked. And most everyone I know does the same... serendipity has replaced skill. The producer of this video says he's encountered something similar between digital and analog audio / music production. When using high end analog equipment, it's somewhat hard to hear the difference between analog and digital, but the process leads to different artistic choices. At work I am sometimes shunned because I like to talk about design and do thought experiments about how software works. On bits of infrastructure that seems critical, I do slow down the production to think more about what we're doing and do more tests up front. This might be the analogue in software production of what this video describes. I remember in high school having to fill out COBOL coding pads (we wrote programs on paper before keying them in) and our pedantic instructor insisted that all working programmers wrote out a flow-chart before even thinking about touching a keyboard. (I'm probably on the old side of the HN demographic.) I think reverting to such practices would DEFINITELY alter your artistic choices in software. It would also make you very unpopular among anyone who wants to get anything done, so I can't recommend it. Anyway... just something to think about. What other time-saving processes in software development can you identify that lead to different (not better, not worse, just different) outcomes?