1/5 I want to say something about software development. I just wrote a major product, alone. I did not design it first, did not use TDD, and had no stories, because I needed to figure out its architecture by actually writing it. After about 20 rounds of minor ...

2/5 re-architecting, I am now confident in the design and will be writing tests. I could have designed it more formally, and used TDD, but that would not have been informed by the experience of writing the product, and the result would have been inelegant, to say the least. ...

3/5 I was able to work this way because I was not on a schedule or working with a team. I own my company.

I think this is the difference between art and labor.

Over the past 40 years that I have been a programmer, we have found great formalisms that allow us to understand ...

4/5 priorities and manage projects much better. But we should not deceive ourselves that software engineering has achieved the status of being a science or engineering. It remains an art, and we fail by not allowing ourselves the time and headroom to be artists.

It is thus ...

5/5 no surprise that Open Source has taken over so much of the industry, because it is often written for love rather than labor, and provides the opportunity for artists to work outside of business priorities and to take the time to be artists.