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**Ian Lopshire:** I'm doing great! |
**Jerod Santo:** \[04:00\] Yay! Welcome, Ian! Congratulations! |
**Ian Lopshire:** Thanks! |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] It's kind of self-aggrandizing, isn't it? ...congratulating you for being a panelist on our show...? \[laughter\] |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** "You won a prize." |
**Kris Brandow:** "Congratulations for joining my podcast!" \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. \[laughs\] |
**Kris Brandow:** Alright. So we don't need any introductions, since we're all hosts here... So given Jerod's comment, I am gonna make the analogy - or I guess the translation? I don't know what I'm about to call this, but... That you know, this idea of painting by numbers is really nice. You can paint some really good... |
**Jerod Santo:** I think it would be useful to attach the analogue to the subject at hand. So if we're talking blank canvas, this was mostly in reference to instructions on what tools I should be using, what practices I should follow, the structure, the architecture of my software project. And I was saying that experie... |
Paint by numbers - the question is what does that draw across to for you guys? I tend to think of framework, preexisting structure, a scaffold of some kind... Obviously, it doesn't apply one to one, because no one's gonna give you a number and say "Put the code right here, and put the green code right there, and the bl... |
**Kris Brandow:** Oh man, Jerod, you're already just ruining the whole fun of this. |
**Jerod Santo:** I'm going meta. \[laughter\] That's what you guys do, isn't it? |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** You fit right in. |
**Kris Brandow:** We don't get to defining what we mean by these things until halfway through the episode. You're just all over the place. But no, I think from my perspective you are right there; I think it is these frameworks oftentimes. Or you know, in the context of the way you write your code, it's all of those pro... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I think it would be unfair to say that folks that use frameworks are deliberately choosing sort of a paint by numbers approach... Because frameworks, scaffolding and all these things - these are productivity tools, not really "Strictly beginner, I'm learning how to do things, I need handholding a... |
Frameworks I don't think really fall in that category. They are strictly productivity, I think. Now, can they help somebody who is starting out? Absolutely. But they help you as a beginner to be productive within a journey of building software with other experienced people who are also using this framework for producti... |
**Kris Brandow:** \[08:03\] I do feel like there's a slight shift in the analogy there though... Because I think when we're talking about things like paint by numbers, or talking less about the thing that the software actually winds up doing, and the structure that we're giving to the software to start with. So when I ... |
**Ian Lopshire:** When I read the paint by numbers analogy, I was more thinking like -- you know, in my first years as a software engineer my manager would give me five tasks, and each of those tasks he's already broken down where this change needs to happen, how you should do it, go do it. And the blank canvas for me ... |
**Jerod Santo:** I think it's a fascinating way of looking at it, and I see why you did that. The original GoTimeFM chat was around - we had tweeted out a clean architecture template for Go services, which some of the gophers in the chat thought has too much ceremony; it was Bob Martin's Clean Code book, and some of th... |
Now, public consumption frameworks that a new person can come to and become productive faster is one aspect of a framework. But you can use frameworks for many productivity things. I think maybe more design patterns, architecture, structure is what Kris was referring to. Is that fair, Kris? More so than laid out tasks ... |
**Kris Brandow:** Yeah, I think so. I think I also have another analogy that is similar to this one, of music, and how there are musicians that can either play by ear, or read sheet music, but can't necessarily compose their own songs. Music composition and music playing are two very different skillsets. But I think yo... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Kris Brandow:** But there's a distinction there, and I think that's what I wanted this episode to be about, is like when you have those types of close distinctions, how do we kind of help ourselves not fall into the trap of thinking that we'll wind up becoming a great composer one day by just practicing a lot of musi... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** You become a great composer by composing. You can become a great musician by simply playing music. Maybe yesterday or the day before I saw some tweet, maybe from Mat Ryer or something, maybe he was retweeting somebody else - of a kid, five years old, who's ripping apart a sonata from Bach, or som... |
And then you obviously have people -- this being on the internet, it's like "Ah, that's nothing. If he can't write music, then he's not a prodigy." I'm thinking "Okay, I can see what you're saying, that in the pantheon of music maybe this particular piece that he happens to be playing, albeit eloquently, could be consi... |
\[12:36\] Now, I wasn't slicing it and saying "Oh, he's good at playing music, but he's bad at composing music." I was saying "Okay, here's somebody performing the art of playing music, and they're pretty good. |
So if I bring this back to software, and I'm like, okay, can I identify somebody who's pretty good at coding, at flying through the keyboard, knowing everything that needs to go in, knows the syntax of the language, knows exactly how to implement an algorithm and do all these things - I can now say "Well, they might be... |
So that's how I see these things. I don't wanna take away from the act of knowing how to code, but at the same time I understand that knowing how to code alone is not sufficient for engineering software. Hopefully, that makes sense. |
**Kris Brandow:** I feel like the YouTube video I sent to you has resonated with you then... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Yeah, I think so. Definitely. I could understand it. Basically, we tend to throw around the "What's the difference between a coder and an engineer?" or whatever it is... And this person who actually - I'm ashamed to say, I didn't even know his name, Leslie Lamport, and so much of what he's done i... |
So I think those who start with a blank canvas are seeking to innovate. Those who start with, for a lack of a better term, the paint by numbers, are seeking to execute. I think there's a difference there. |
**Jerod Santo:** The point that I was trying to make and I'll try to make here again is that while I agree with that, that man is a master who changed the way that software is written. He's like a Picasso. And lots of us are never gonna be Picasso. I'm not saying you all can't be, and I can't be; I'm not trying to limi... |
\[16:04\] Some of us wanna paint because we love painting. And we're never gonna be Picasso. And we maybe wanna be a working painter, maybe we wanna paint portraits for people who paid us. Isn't even George W. Bush paints portraits now in his retirement? He's average at it, but people still give him respect about it, b... |
A lot of the conversations on Go Time - which I very much appreciate, but I've also been in the business for a very long time - are very deep, and nuanced, and from an expert perspective, and... Hey, y'all are experts, so of course we want an expert perspective. But sometimes the question is like - well, Ian, when you ... |
**Ian Lopshire:** Yeah, it's a great question. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay, fair enough. |
**Kris Brandow:** At the beginning, of course... |
**Ian Lopshire:** Yeah, exactly. I mean, I start in one big file and I just go, you know? |
**Jerod Santo:** You just start writing code? I mean, then you're coding. Surely there's steps before that. Okay, let's pass it to Kris. Kris, you write software for a living, you're a blank canvas kind of guy... Where do you start? What do you do? |
**Kris Brandow:** I think because I am who I am, I usually start with a combination of writing some sort of document to make sure I kind of understand what the problem is. Actually, I guess in the beginning-beginning, when someone brings something for me to build, I ask a lot of questions, and make sure that it's like ... |
That's usually the on-ramp that I take... But that's really a lot because I'm a writer, so my comfort zone is an empty document in Google Docs, or an empty Vim window where I can just start typing out, "Okay, what is it that I'm trying to do?" |
**Jerod Santo:** Blank canvas. |
**Kris Brandow:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** Johnny, does that resonate with you? Is that similar to your process? |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Yeah, I'd say so. Obviously, there's gonna be basically what am I being asked to do - is it to add a feature in existing software, which hopefully that's an easier task, or it's supposed to be an easier task than basically building something brand new... \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** It depends on how legacy code that sucker is. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** \[19:49\] Depending on how old that thing is, right? And whereby Kris jumps into a Google Doc or a Vim window and whatnot and starts writing things out, I tend to be more of the -- I'm a visual thinker, so I tend to fire up one model or build us a chart or something, and I start mapping out flows... |
And then from there, I start to write about the different pieces of that system. Then I take Kris' approach and say "Well, what is this thing? If I were to get a readme for a codebase for this particular repository that represents this component in my system, what should that readme tell me?" So I do readme-driven deve... |
So I kind of approach it that way... Basically, I guess you call that top-down, whereby I try to get a "What's the 30,000-foot view of this thing?" and then I sort of slowly descend into the nitty-gritty. |
**Jerod Santo:** I'm similar. I'm an outliner though, so I work in outlines; I think in outlines - you know, top-level, and I star to drill down and start to feather it out as it makes sense... What depends on what, what do I know versus what do I not know, what's easy, what's hard? And then substeps. Trying to take th... |
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