Five and Counting: developer.* Past, Present, and Future

Hello, I am Dan Read, the proprietor of this web site. Longtime readers and newcomers alike might be interested to learn what's been going on lately with me and with DeveloperDotStar. I'll cover a little historical ground, catch up on current events, and talk about what the future looks like for the developerdotstar.com web site and developer.* Books. If some of the history and reminiscence starts to bore you, feel free to skip ahead to the "future" stuff at the end. :-)

It's emblematic, I think, of how insanely busy 2006 was for me that the five year anniversary of developer.* passed in the middle of last Summer without any comment or celebration here on the site. Five years! It's hard for me to believe it was June 2001 that I posted two of the first essays on the site, "Principled Programming" and "The Human Impact of Software."

Those early pieces published on the site were some of my first forays into writing about software development, and they reflect not only where I was at the time as a person, as a writer, and as a software developer. The story of DeveloperDotStar's changes and growth reflects my own story over the same period. As such, there are both successes to relish and disappointments to reconcile. I'm proud of the many accomplishments, and of all the great software writing that has been published here (mostly by contributors other than myself), but lately, because last year I tried to do too much, I have also been feeling the sting of loose ends left frayed and people let down.

The story of DeveloperDotStar can also be seen as one of increasing scope (and it is my hope that this expansive trend can continue into the future). Originally the site started out as a place to publish my own essays about software development, like the two linked above. At the time, early 2001, the blogging thing had not really taken off yet. At the time, as I recall, Joel on Software was the closest analog on my radar screen, though I'm sure others were doing similar things at the time. (FWIW, according to Alexa, Joel On Software went online July 29, 2000, just under a year before developer.*.)

I had some things I wanted to say, but I did not see any publication or web site where they would seem to fit, and I also knew that my own writing voice needed some time to develop, so I started my own publication-of-one in June 2001 (according to Alexa, it was actually in March of that year, but I think it took me a few months to get things together). The first version of the site was hosted on an early server-side web hosting product called Internet on a Stick, which was owned by my friends Bryan and Stan Sedwick. Looking back on it now, what I really wanted was a blog, but I didn't know to call it that; so I started what amounted to a blog, but I called it a "magazine," replete with its own old fashioned Letters to the Editor page.

Over the next couple years I continued to publish occasional essays, and the site built up a small following. The next phase of developer.* started when I decided that my own voice was not enough; if I'm honest with myself, the expansion of the scope of the site was also related to my own growing dissatisfaction with my writing, both in terms of content and style. Through my own growth process I was realizing that I was not satisfied with the certainty in my writing, nor what I felt was a tone that was too didactic. My essay "Software Design and Programmers," published on this site in March of 2003, was the significant piece of polished writing that I wrote for developer.* (not counting the many blog posts, editorials, and book reviews I have written since then).

One memorable event around this time was my attendance at one of Gerald Weinberg's last Problem Solving Leadership workshops (where, incidentally, I was lucky enough to be in attendance at the same workshop as Agile/XP people such as Martin Fowler, Andrew Hunt, Alistair Cockburn, Ron Jeffries, and John Brewer). This coincided with my increasing admiration of the writing styles of authors such as Gerald Weinberg and Martin Fowler (and probably also Alistair Cockburn) who always manage a fine balance between a confident and humble tone, speaking with authority, but also empathy, with an appreciation for complexity (and a corresponding avoidance of ideology), and with an attitude that says that the author is ready to be proven wrong.

I continue to strive for these ideals; I have found that the best writers in our field (Brooks, McConnell, DeMarco, Weinberg, Glass, Parnas, Yourdon, Spolsky, Wiegers, and too many more to mention) exhibit these qualities. I think what these writers have is more than a highly developed writing style; I believe these people have also been in the software game long enough to have been humbled by software, by computing machines, and by the enormous difficulty of pulling together teams of people to make all that software stuff happen. These words of Gerald Weinberg, quoted from his personal biography on his web site, have always been a great inspiration to me:

After almost 40 years working with computers, I've learned a couple of things, but I still can't make sense out of most of it. Most of all, I've discovered that people are at the bottom of just about every problem - but I think I knew that when I was little, then got talked out of it somewhere along the way. I've worked hard at relearning this lesson, and learning how to do something about it. While educating myself, I learned a second principle: I'm the "people" at the bottom of most of my problems.

When I first read that it about knocked me over, and went and re-read Understanding the Professional Programmer in a whole new light. The move from being DeveloperDotStar's only author into the role of editor and curator allowed me to gain some distance from my own writing, to process some of these insights, and to focus more on my own growth as a software professional and a person. In the meantime, I was able to work with some great people who contributed so much to this site from the Summer of 2003 until now.

The first article published the "new" developer.* was by Danny Faught, another attendee of the aforementioned PSL workshop and a talented writer (mostly on QA-related topics). It was called "Diving in Test-First." We published it on July 26, 2003, just over two years after "Principled Programming." I will be eternally grateful to Danny for contributing it, and to every other writer who contributed writing to this site in the three years since. (You can check out the full list of edited articles published on this here.)

I posted the first official blog post to developer.* on Halloween (October 31st) of 2004. It was titled, predictably, "Welcome." Since then, the blogging platform of developer.* has seen its share of periods of high activity as well as slow times. The original idea was called the "developer.* Cooperative Digest," and it was to be a "community blogging platform." Partly this was driven by the limited individual blog personalization capabilities of the open source CMS framework we adopted, Drupal (an unfortunate flaw to this day in this otherwise best-in-class tool), but the "Cooperative Digest" idea was also based on the seeming promise of community-based blogging.

We've had surges of blogging over the years, followed always by lulls whenever the inspiration for the surge wears off. Partly I know that my own inconsistency as a contributor to the blogs and discussion have been a large factor in the failure to sustain a thriving community of bloggers. But I try not to feel too bad about it since none of early attempts at creating a community blogging space has really survived. Instead, the blogosphere has evolved into a true distributed network, with each blogger controlling his or her own node, connected but still apart. Things like social bookmarking and wikis have instead provided the glue. My deepest thanks go out to the many people who have blogged or commented here--most especially the indefatigable Edward Nilges, who was one of the first bloggers to join the "Cooperative Digest"; Edward has never needed my prodding or guidance to share his unique viewpoint on software, philosophy, culture, and politics. (There are too many other names to mention, and I fear if I start I'll miss someone important.)

The future of blogging on the developer.* web site remains uncertain. I can say for sure, however, that I have no regrets about our experimentation thus far with various blogging ideas for one reason: some really great writing has been posted here, all without me standing in the middle as editor. It has been a great complement to the edited articles side of the site, and has filled in during many quiet times between edited articles.

Over the years I've stubbornly kept the developer.* web site free of a commercial focus. This comes from my vision of developer.* as an "indie" enterprise, inspired partly by BBS sysops (in the days before the web hit big I spent many late night hours in on independently operated BBS systems and reading Jack Rickard's wonderful Boardwatch Magazine), partly by the many small press zines I used to read in college by the stack (anyone else remember Factsheet Five?), and partly by the example of great indie record labels like SST, Touch and Go, and Dischord.

I was also deeply affected by what happened to software publishing, especially on the web, during and after the great gold rush circa 1997-2001: many of the best sites on the web, which had been created by people just like me, people who might have been BBS sysops or zine editors a decade before, were bought up by exceedingly lame big media companies who promptly covered the sites with ads, popups, and tracking cookies, locked the good content behind passwords, and started spamming their mailing lists with "newsletters" and "special offers from partners" every two hours or so. (The new site InfoQ gives me hope that the future of commercially oriented software development publishing will be brighter. I could give other examples of excellent sites that are operating now in the post-media-consolidation era, but I'll resist further distraction from the present topic...)

Our independent posture will hopefully continue, but the nature of the game has changed somewhat with the most recent step in the evolution of developer.*: the new developer.* Books publishing enterprise, in which I am joined by my business and life partner, Gayle Devereaux. By necessity of survival, and in order to do the right thing by the authors who sign up to have their books published by us (nothing is more disheartening to an author than to have his or her book disappear when the publisher goes under), developer.* Books must operate as a business, independent spirit or not. It may be a number of years before it's a business that will pay anyone a full salary, but it is much more a business than a hobby, as the web site has always been.

As such, developer.* Books requires a more serious commitment of time and energy. This commitment to book publishing must be balanced with the fact that I still have a challenging day job designing and building software for my employer's clients, with the demands of keeping up a web site, with promises already made to writers with articles in the works, and with all of the other important aspects of life.

Books have always been a passion of mine, and the chance to be involved in their development and production was something I could not resist. 2006 saw the publication of our first two books, Software Conflict 2.0 and Software Creativity 2.0, both by software luminary Robert L. Glass. We are immensely proud of these two books, not only because they are fine books, but also because they ask critical questions and offer important insights for the field of software. Most importantly, they are excellent examples of what we have always searched for as a publisher of software writing: a timeless quality. We have more books in the works (stay tuned for announcements in the near future).

An early version of draft of this long post you are reading about the past and future of developer.* (which I have been trying to finish writing for two months) started off with this hook sentence: developer.* has a big problem: me. The current draft you are reading (for the few who have made it this far) does not start off this way, but the sentiment still holds because it reflects perfectly what happened in 2006: I tried to take on way too much, said "Yes!" too often, indulged too many of my ambitious ideas for the Great Web and Book Publishing Company In the Sky, and made promises I couldn't keep. I don't like letting people down, and I did that a lot last year--so much so that here it is the end of February 2007, and I have yet to finish picking up the pieces from what fell off of my overfull plate in 2006.

(If you're one of the people who are wondering if I fell off the face of the earth, please accept for now my sincere apology in this public forum; I hope to catch up person-to-person soon. I was voted Most Dependable by my 1987 high school class, believe it or not--a date which puts me squarely in mid life crisis territory. My dad bought a 1985 Mustang GT 5.0 for his mid life crisis; I started a book publishing company...there's something backwards about that. Interestingly, another thing that happened to me at the end of 2006 is that I realized that I was devoting too much energy to my online life, to "virtual" things; I think my dad had the right idea with that Mustang; I think it made him feel more connected to something real, something connected to physical things like gravity and torque, something directly under his control.)

Which brings us to now, looking ahead. What is the future of developer.*?

I can't say for sure, other than to say that as a general matter developer.* will hopefully be around for at least another five years. I can also say for sure that the book publishing side of developer.* must remain my primary focus. That ship has left the port, and I have to steer it. Not to mention, I'd like to repeat as often as possible that wonderful feeling that comes from holding in your hand the first copy of a new book, hot off the press, as they say. (In the case of Software Conflict 2.0, I go to repeat the experience again when the new Korean edition arrived in my mailbox.)

However, I still feel strongly that the developer.* web site is an important outlet for diverse software writing, particularly by less experienced writers, whom I have always enjoyed working with, no matter how many drafts it took to get the article in first class shape. In some ways the blogosphere, which gives everyone his or her own publishing platform, supplants the need for a "magazine" of edited articles based on gift culture principles, but I believe there will always be room for edited articles. Writers want to write them, and readers want to read them. The problem is that I just can't keep up with both the articles and the books.

So what to do? If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them. My best idea at this point is that developer.* needs one or more volunteer articles editors; this person or persons would work with writers to get articles ready for publication. I've got several excellent pieces in the hopper from last year (if the authors have not given up on me altogether), and I get emails every week or so from new and established authors seeking a home for their work. Ideally, this person or persons would also share with me a passion for our unique content niche: diverse, general interest, mostly non-technology-specific, articles, essays, and interviews with, as we like to say, "a timeless quality." The person or persons would also need to share the "indie" spirit of the web site, which pretty much means that it will remain for the foreseeable future a non-money-making enterprise. (I'd rather shift the web site into archive mode than give that up.) The job also requires (despite my own shortcomings in some or all of these areas) the basic traits of all editors: strong opinions; a passion for writing; some knowledge of grammar and language mechanics; a willingness to be frank; and perhaps most importantly generosity, empathy, and patience.

This would be a tall order even if I was offering money for the job. Unfortunately, there is no money to offer. The work is its own reward, as I can attest. I regret in some ways that my own journey has brought me to a place where I cannot make room for it any longer.

Maybe, here in the midst of Web 2.0, there is a technical solution to this problem: a web-based software platform that will "harness the crowd" to turn ideas and rough drafts into polished, edited, articles. Kind of like a Web 2.0 writing workshop, but with a very pragmatically focused end game: the edited and polished article can be published right here on the developer.* web site once the process and people have deemed it ready.

I welcome any thoughts, comments, questions, and/or ideas you may have related to anything in this post. Feel free to use the comments form to share them, or if you prefer email me privately. I am honored and humbled by your interest.

Thanks for reading,
Dan

P.S.
As for my own writing, I do plan to get back some day to doing more than writing the occasional blog post. I have two software books that have been in the works for some time (really, for as long as there has been a developer.*), and when the time is right I aim to finish them. I believe that both will have that elusive "timeless quality" and will be worthwhile contributions to the field. I also believe that while curating, editing, and publishing have in some sense been distractions from the writing, these activities have also made me a better writer and a better person (it's hard to achieve the former without the latter, I think), so no regrets here. If having a mid life crisis has taught me one thing, it's that there is little time in this life for regrets.