Introduction

As the manuscript for this book came together, I realized that a lot of the content was based on a limited and naive philosophy of software creation. I was outlining this philosophy as it applied to each chapter, then explaining what the various relevant tasks were and how they fit into that philosophy. Here it is, written explicitly and separately from other considerations in the book:

Our role as people who make software is to "solve problems," and only incidentally to make software. Making software for its own sake is at best a benign waste of time and money, or at worst detrimental to those exposed to it. Our leading considerations at all times must be the people whose problems we are solving, and the problems themselves.

If this were the 1970s, you might call that new age claptrap. These days, you'd probably just think of it as the kind of nonsense you get in those self-help books about becoming a better manager; perhaps I should've left software behind...