Crosswalk Development

There's an interesting phenomena that occurs when crossing a city street on a busy day. Often people will stop when the crosswalk tells them "Don't Walk." However, often times it is clear to walk when traffic is light. This is often necessary when there are a good number of people crowding the street lining up for the crosswalk. And yet nobody goes. Finally, one brave soul will look left, right, and left again, then proceed to cross the forbidden cement engulf onto the distant concrete island across the street. What happens after he crosses? Everyone else crosses as well. They needed motivation to cross; they were looking for a leader. They really didn't care who, what he was capable of, or where he was going. They just needed the confidence to cross the street.

Ok, actually this is a total rip-off from the New Testament. Jesus says in John 10.27 that "My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me." Whether you wish to call it the sheep syndrome or the crosswalk syndrome, it matters not. What does matter is that we recognize this as an incredible opportunity in software development. Why? Because most developers are like sheep--they want to follow a precise written plan but don't care to actually lead themselves.

There are various reasons why this is. The most common scenario is the "program by fear" approach. That is the approach where the company's mentality and business model says, "Don't touch anything unless it's so antiquated that we are forced to change" or "The way we have it has worked for years; why should we change?" This attitude often turns programmers off from leading the way.

What do I mean by "leading the way?" I mean using NHibernate instead of continuing to use ADO.NET. I mean buying and reading books just for the sake of learning new things. I mean tearing your old code to pieces and forcing it to be clean--not merely being satisfied because "it works." It doesn't work, because no one else can read it but you. ADO.NET doesn't work because it takes 10 minutes to write a method that feeds the SQL statement into a dataset, returns it, parses it on the business layer and wraps it into an enumerable collection. These are the sorts of things that pile up the traffic on the street and forms a barrier in which no other person can progress.

Programmers are often afraid to do these things because they aren't sure if there are unseen cars in the metaphorical road. My best advice? For that I must borrow a slogan from Nike: "Just do it." There's a saying, "It is better to ask forgiveness in permission." In software, this is true. Do what you know is best; cross the street. Once your bosses and co-workers see there is no danger crossing or on the other side, they will happily thank you in the end.