Chapter 22. Kindness and Code

It is very easy to think of software development as being an entirely technical activity, where humans don't really matter and everything is about the computer. However, the opposite is actually true.

Software engineering is fundamentally a human discipline.

Many of the mistakes made over the years in trying to fix software development have been made by focusing purely on the technical aspects of the system without thinking about the fact that it is human beings who write the code. When you see somebody who cares about optimization more than readability of code; when you see somebody who won't write a comment but will spend all day tweaking their shell scripts to be fewer lines, when you have somebody who can't communicate but worships small binaries: then you're seeing various symptoms of this problem.

Software is about People

In reality, software systems are written by people. They are read by people, modified by people, understood...