It is said that truth is stranger than fiction, but fiction, after all, is the amalgamation of diced, disembodied truths neatly concatenated to form Frankensteinian alternate reality.
Like the curiously segmented children's flip-book, the writer splices the forehead, nose, and mouth of dramatically different faces to form a startling, but amusing, monster. Fiction liberates and empowers, unfettered by constraints of geography, gender, age, or occupation.
Fiction is the refactored, agile truth, augmented with third-party plug-ins, debugged, and recompiled.
Dredged from the bowels of software development, scraped from the shoes of code-spewing veterans, technology truth searches for a voice like a headless specter swinging a lantern on the railroad of methodologies. With the friendly anonymity of fiction, pearls of perceived software development wisdom can be scattered along with the swine leavings of project failures and analyzed without the unflattering spotlight of accountability.
Software developers are like Dickens characters in our collective diversity, from introverted code-mongers to gregarious, mutual friends, living out the best and worst of times on the center stage of technology. We are proud and prejudiced for or against Microsoft, but generally toward are own competencies. We are software sleuths, following a tenuous trail of coding clues to solve modern mysteries traced in transient chalk on the pavement of progress.
I have long been interested in software development fiction as a form of edutainment, having enjoyed Tom DeMarco's The Deadline, but wanting more. I will refrain from identifying precisely which Developer.* blogger unwittingly inspired this particular foray into the genre. His eclectic rants and rhetoric simultaneously confounded, amused, and impressed. I actually toyed with the notion of suggesting that he offer up his considerable talent on the altar of my fictional cravings, but feared I might be pegged as the borderline software schizophrenic that I probably am. To say that he inspired the concept or a particular character is to say that his blogging served as psycho-kinetic springboard, not that his essence will be accurately reflected or recognizable. Perhaps, with any fortune, the inspiration will be reciprocal and we will yet enjoy his novel approach to software development.
I hope that these ramblings have intrigued you just a little. Tomorrow I will post chapter 1 in A Scandal in Software (I'm not married to that title). Perhaps you can peruse it on company time and claim with some element of clear-conscience that it's work-related?
My intention is to post a new chapter on a weekly basis, but that will likely depend on its reception. I realize we're all practically blind from reading ubiquitous specifications and procedures, and I wouldn't want to burden anyone's mental inbox unless you can derive some pleasure from it. I hope that you can find yourself somewhere in the pages, and are provoked to chuckle, scoff, or nod along the way. At least the price is right. (Editor's note: here is the the completed online book [1].)
To the developer.* international readership, the site editor has explained to me that the use of pop culture references and curious slang can make translation difficult. I apologize. I can only imagine how some of this must come across if translated literally. Yet, I cannot find it within myself to apply a flat-iron to the frizz that is my writing style. I hope you understand and take it as a challenge to your language skills. Personally, despite the fact that I took any number of French courses in high school and college, I am only able to stutter along with phrases that are tributes to my incompetence, such as Je sais pas (spoken with an eastern North Carolina drawl) so I am in awe of lingual ambidexterity.
In case you're inclined to respond:
1. Do you have any interest in the blending of story with software development culture, or do you prefer to keep your entertainment and technical material in a segmented plate so the juices never mingle?
2. Do you ever download reading material to an electronic reading device? (Personally, I still have a working Rocketbook by the defunct Nuvomedia and an RCA ebook and even a Franklin ebookman. I haven't yet bothered downloading text to a PDA. I must have been one of the few happy consumers of these products. Contemporary publications were generally too expensive to tempt, but it was great for public domain and home grown material.)
3. Are you faithful to one book until it is finished, or are you a polygamous reader, like me, with a dozen or so books stacked by your bed in varying states of completion?