After reading Venkatesh Rao’s essay on The Bloody-Minded Pleasures of Engineering. I can’t help but think about why I am an engineer. And not surprisingly of course I come to the immediate conclusion; Because I am. Seriously, I can’t really help it. You see I’m pretty much an Nth generation engineer. The more I explore my personal family history, the more I discover the variety of engineers, architects, craftsmen (and craftswomen) and other creative types of folk that came before me. I suppose the fact that most of them were not terribly famous is significant as well. For it just adds to the sense of “normality”, the sense of “well of course this is the way to think and do” and so on that I just take for granted. In other words I engineer because I am. (sorry Descartes)
My father once described the engineer’s mission or credo as being the noble goal to “cure mankind of the pox”. To solve problems that will help people. You know I rarely stop to think about this idea. Yet if I look back on all I’ve done, I just naturally tend to operate this way. It’s not a choice I make each day, I just do it. I now look at my own children and see the same thing happening. Is there an engineering gene? (just try to google that one) Perhaps, but I think the cultural evolutionary forces are strongly at work here. One thing I do know is that I so strongly resonate with the social software movement and get very excited about the innovation happening is this area. It’s almost two big for my mind to grasp at times when I start to think about the sheer scale and massive impact of technology on society that is happening today. Yet I am perfectly at ease and “with the flow” about it. I feel like a surfer riding the biggest wave of all time. A fantasy wave that lasts decades not seconds. It’s huge and every once in a while big currents intersect and it’s a thrill to ride the complex eddies, crests and troughs that get created when this happens.
The next big waves to rise, merge, swell, combine and change everything once again are coming hard and fast now. Huge social graphs representing real people are growing and maturing. (Social software for networking, Facebook, LinkedIn etc) Tremendous and fairly complete collections of world knowledge are maturing and are open and accessible now. ( See my previous posts on open knowledge stores and ontologies such as Freebase, OpenCyc etc.) Massively scalable computing infrastructure is now available for anyone to purchase with a click of a button. (Cloud computing; Amazon E3, Google, etc…) And software engineering itself is no longer a long slow process that only experts can take part in. The HCI pattern of Incremental Revealing is evolving to the point where simple users can learn to become power users who then learn to become programmers without even realizing it. (Adding applications in Facebook, building templates in Wikipedia, and so on…)
And so what does this mean for the professionals, those like myself that have spent their careers learning to work “these things we call computers”? It means many things, it means I must embrace the idea the duration of the software development cycle is headed downward to that of minutes. Not days as one might expect if the developer were programming in Ruby on Rails. Not weeks as one might expect if the developer were programing in Python or Perl. Not months as one might expect if one were developing in Java or C++, or .Net. No sir, the next generation programmer will be dragging and dropping an cutting and pasting Urls and Purls, accessing the worlds knowledge and leveraging all the fundamental logic, algorithms, and patterns as easy as can be. And the biggest thrill is when the cost of experimentation becomes extremely low and an idea can be tested in seconds or minutes. This changes everything at a very fundamental level.
Extreme programming and Agile computing will be the norm so to speak. It may not even be called that any more. Some may just call it “configuration”. Perhaps an old idea to be reborn as a new creature. But whatever we call it, it will be profound. When in the normal course of the day, I can try a new programming idea to solve a problem, say for example in the very same meeting that has presented the problem to me, in a few seconds, and I can walk away with the solution actually deployed, in place, job done, then the world is a different place. This is exactly where we are headed. I have already had a taste of this in the last few years. I’ve experienced this myself on a small, limited scale, and I keep seeing, here and there, demos, hints, suggestions, that this is coming hard and fast. The difference of course is when it it’s happening on a regular daily occurrence. When it no longer becomes a “wow, that was cool” event. Then the world is a different place. Are we there yet? No. Will we be there soon? Yes. Will there still be a need for long drawn software development projects? Of course. There will be always brand new, hard to build, things we want. And it will take time to build them. But, quite possibly there maybe fewer of these large projects. Of course on that account I am not sure what the “curve” will look like. I do suspect it is the power law curve. Time will tell.
And so it gets back to that noble effort, to help people solve there problems. The speed and intensity of how we can help solve peoples needs may be more than just a thrill. Solving the worlds information needs leads to oh so many many other good things. (better food, medicine, security, peace efforts, fuel distribution, and so on). Potentially the entire next generation of digital natives will be at the very least skilled information engineers. And what does it mean when everyone can work this way. (because it’s easy, and natural) Not just 7% of the population like today’s engineers. Does it mean we, as a society, are potentially all becoming engineers. (or attaining this quality) Or at least all that want to be. Scary thought? Maybe not. Maybe it’s just part of our Childhood's End, the maturing of a species so to speak. Food for thought, only time will tell in this regard and I will not try to predict the outcome of the entire lot of us fuzzy thinking bipeds on planet earth.
In the mean time I will continue being who I am. Engineer? I suppose. I guess I don’t know any other way. Of course I dislike labels and I do quite often like to think of myself as an artist. ( I’m a musician and a woodworker as well) And actually as far as I can tell all those engineers, archtiects, carftsmen and craftswomen in my family history were all artists. They were painters, woodworkers, musicians, they created with food, needle and thread, beads and crafts. So next time you think about engineers, who and why we are the way we are, think again. We are not as clearly definable as you might believe. It’s really all about the creative thing. This creative thing, this force, it is hard to pin down. Go ahead and try to define it. Just try to define creativity. good luck. I won’t. I’ll just do it. Because that’s what I do.