In his book “Love in the Time of Cholera” Gabriel García Márquez describes a love triangle taking place in a Latin American country in the turn of the 20th century, set in the background of repeated outbreaks of plague and civil war (the word cholera is also a synonym for anger in Portuguese). On its face, it’s a simple story of unrequited love in a small community reeling under world events. It’s only when you get a bit deeper that you realize that it is a story about stability in a time of violent change.
As I write this blog, the world around us is in the grips of massive change. The corona pandemic has altered our lives in profound ways, and in an incredibly short period of time. Six months ago, I was working to bring new processes and development methodologies to a promising startup in the solar power space. Now, with world demand for energy plummeting, they have had to let me go and they’re fighting for survival. Sadly, this story is repeating itself all over the world, with some massive repercussions.
Yet, it’s not all bad. The massive disruption in the way we work and live brings in it the chance to change and grew as people and industry. All over the world, people and companies are discovering that things like working from home, flexible schedules, and agility are the way to survive. These are things that were reviled for decades as being “too hard” and “not suitable for our industry and company culture”, and yet here they are. We change because we have to change, we adapt to survive, this is the greatest power the human race has ever possessed.
This is a blog about Software Development, about code and process, about the What, the How, and the Why of our industry. These are turbulent times, and it might sometimes seems that writing code for yet another API is meaningless when people are dying. But remember this: We, the people who write code, are gods onto the machine. I know it sounds bombastic, but there is no other profession where a person can sit in front of a computer and create by themselves something that can effect the whole world. This blog is about creating a new world, step by step, through our fingertips. We are creators. Makers. Let’s talk about how to make things better.
