Situated Software

Microsoft was another concern. But they also were very, very slow. They finally today have a product called SharePoint, which is somewhat similar to the ArsDigita Community System. One thing that we did which enabled us to be much, much faster than our competitors was that we developed on and released our software from running real-world systems. F

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When you try to make something that solves everything, you obsess over questions of power: how to make something that is omnipotent and everlasting. But when you make something that does one thing well, the questions are much more personal: does it solve my problem? and for how long? and who for? and where will it push the space around it? I want t... See more

Wirth's Law threatens to make things even worse. As software rots, multinationals may become the only players capable of making websites.

But people like Bartosz Ciechanowski are forging paths to elegant futures. The source code for his mechanical watch demo is proof that honest software is viable. Each guide is erected as a giant wall of WebGL. It'... See more

If one believes, as I have argued at many places in this book, that creativity comes from individuals and not from structures or processes, then a central question facing the software manager is how to design structure and process so as to enhance, rather than inhibit, creativity and initiative. Fortunately, this problem is not peculiar to software

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