A twitter between my daughter and a friend:

@jordanwb Are you related to Rebecca Wirfs-Brock? Her name was mentioned in my Software Design and Development class. This class isn’t any fun.

@thismax that’s my mom! I’ll let her know you guys are talking about her. 02:16 PM September 16, 2008

Software development can be fun when people collegially work towards solving a design problem. Last week I visited a client and helped them understand and apply responsibility-driven design principles and practices to the design of software components and subsystems. By far, the most rewarding activity during the week was a workshop where designers paired off and solved a common design problem. Sharing design ideas and initial solutions was fun. Reworking their designs to cover more cases was fun. And taking good ideas from others and melding them into a better solution was an unexpected benefit of all this sharing. One key to the success of this workshop was that a real problem was chosen that didn’t have a pre-existing owner or preferred solution. It was a problem without territorial boundaries and/or clashing vested interests. So design teams were genuinely open to constructive criticism from others. And the small teams could go much faster working in pairs than working in a larger group.

Collegial, thoughtful, reflective, not-too-detailed-at-first designs. Highly productive. And fun. Now why aren’t more design efforts like that? The best design and development experiences in my career have been where I’ve worked on small, tight teams. There was mutual respect, a common goal, pride in our work, and a healthy dose of reality: let’s think about the problem a bit, then prove our ideas by implementing them. We may have had disagreements, but we found a way to discuss and weigh options without getting bogged down or wedded to any particular solution. Collaborating was fun under those circumstances. I can remember some not so fun times too: people fighting over style instead of substance, working too hard but not too smart, and clashing egos preventing us from finding any common ground. That wasn’t fun. It was a grind. Even though those projects may have successfully completed, the thought at their end was ’finally!’ instead of ’yay, we did it!’

More twitter:

Coding ’till almost 4am... am I acting like a stereotypical programmer now? On the upside, I implemented the Hill Cypher, and feel badass. 12:48 AM September 11

Getting things done at 4 a.m. can be fun, too. Nothing like a sense of real accomplishment after a long haul programming effort. But it can get old fast. Especially if you’re not a grad student and you’re working solo on a design effort without the support and encouragement from your team mates.