I was struck by Susan Elliott Sim's posting on Slashdot titled "No more coding from Scratch?" To me, the responses seemed to scatter far from the mark. We are reaching a point where the rules of technology development shift at a fundamental level.
This has a direct bearing on those of us working in media, as technology and media are now deeply interconnected. I'll illustrate some of the implications of that.
Many years ago, I learned to code in C. I had a home computer that didn't have any software, but I got my hands on a compiler. Some of my local online friends helped me learn. They were developers who worked for tech companies such as Unisys, Control Data and the Minnesota Supercomputer Center.
One of the things they taught me is that coders live to code. Every one of them had a project in the hopper that involved reinventing the wheel in some way -- writing their own text editors, writing their own command shells, even hacking the compiler and libraries. Creating a better text editor might happen -- but it would be a byproduct. The real product was the joy of wrestling with code. Some people build ships in bottles. Some people reinvent wheels.
There are two ways this applies to us. One has to do with technology; the other is more about journalism.
As we media people build Internet services, we have to employ technogeeks (and sometimes we become technogeeks). Over and over I've seen the pattern repeated:
Webtech gets hired. Webtech disses all existing technology. Webtech sets about to change everything. Webtech writes his own content management system. Webtech then leaves voluntarily, or gets fired for being a twit. Newspaper is now stuck with an unsupportable platform. The next webtech immediately sets out to change everything.
Rinse, repeat. What did we really gain? Nothing. Webtech isn't really interested in our goals; webtech is a victim of Maslow's Hammer: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
But just as the webtech is more interested in pounding code than the social and business value we're supposed to be creating, so are we cursed in our newsrooms.
Reporters live to report. Photographers live for the image. Editors love to edit, the process of redacting and combining and producing the good old product.
Periodically we declare it's time to redesign, which turns into a huge project in which all the deck chairs on the Titanic are reupholstered. We reinvent the newspaper only to emerge with ... the newspaper, even if it may be online instead of in print.
Open the doors? Invite the public into the process? Oh, that quickly turns into "citizen journalism." Get the public to pound the same old nails.
But now the rules are being rewritten in ways that impact both the codehead and the reporter.
Vernor Vinge's notion of the "programmer archaeologist" really is about discovering what's already out there, and placing it into valuable context. The mashup, the journalist-blogger and the participative website are aligned with this concept; the traditional requirements-driven "software engineer" and the traditional newspaper journalist are not.
The open-source movement is changing everything about technology. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP-Perl-Python, Rail, Django, Drupal, AJAX, JSON, REST interfaces and open APIs mean the developer's real challenge is to keep up with what's already out there and rearrange it in ways that add value. It's a different skillset and ultimately all about people and their needs much more than it's about computers and code.
What does that tell us about doing journalism in a networked world where everyone can be, and eventually will be, a publisher?