importance of pride in ones work

I’ve started taking the time to read a few blogs again. One of the blogs I’ve started reading is the famous Uncle Bob who I’m ashamed to admit I only really found out about relatively recently after his interview on Hanselminutes. Listening to that show and recent readings of his books and Crystal Clear by Alistair Cockborn have really put us in the right direction at Lightning Tools and also been incredibly motivating. Currently we do a lot of our development work remotely rather than all sitting in the same location but this is soon to change with the opening of Lightning Tools HQ – very exciting stuff!

Uncle Bobs recent post called ‘Why the sea is boiling hot’ struck a real cord with me - ‘I want developers to take pride in their work.’

Some people I used to work with may laugh at me finding that important – and I’m not sure if it is because I have got older and wiser or now run a software company – but it’s really a great question to ask some one – ‘are you proud of that bit of code’ when you’ve found an issue that really should have been picked up. Putting more processes in place when we get into the new office such as pair programming and maybe even TDD(!) will help developers become more professional and proud of the work they complete. David Heinermeier Hansson posted a response to Uncle Bob saying that as well as engineers we need artists – but I’ve got to agree with Uncle Bob in that these processes and systems that take care of the professional development process actually will allow developers to free their mind and come up with great new ideas and features.

This again brings me round to thinking about Getting Things Done – as many things seem to these days. One of the barriers people put up to David Allens GTD processes are that they are of an artistic nature and do not want to be boxed in by the processes of GTD. The reply that is always given by GTD’ers is that by letting GTD manage your projects, tasks, inbox etc – your brain is free from having to keep track of these things and actually gives you more of an opportunity to use it how it should be – in an artistic way thinking up new ideas, product features, writing songs, painting pictures or whatever you think being artistic is!