Software is about people, not code

Dear new developer,

When I was starting out, I thought that software development was all about code. After all, that was the main thing I was working on. Well, maybe not the main thing, as I needed to know what code to write, how to interface with other code, what was the problem being solved, how to deliver it, the correctness of the code, and how it could be maintained.

But, the writing the code felt like the most important part of the job. It was certainly the most tangible and fundamental. After all, if the code doesn’t work, all those other things won’t matter, right?

This led me to focus on how to write code. I wrote up a style guide for the company. Researched new technologies. Read and commented in online forums. Learned how to decompile java bytecode to reverse engineer proprietary software. Argued about code formatting. Joined a design patterns discussion group. Attended meetups and blogged.

I undertook all of these activities to be better at writing code.

However, I eventually learned that people were far more important for the success of a software project than code. This crystallized for me after I saw a few very interesting (to me!) codebases abandoned for lack of a market or other business flaws.

This was a surprise to me, insofar as I’d assumed the code was the most important part of software development. But really:

• Software and code is created for people and their purposes. It doesn’t exist on its own, isolated from human needs.
• People will use the tools or applications built with code (or, worse, they won’t). This means that they have to be bought in to what is being built and consulted about functionality.
• Most people don’t know or care about the code. (If they did, they’d likely be a developer.) They’re just trying to get something done. The most beautiful, well tested, flexible, configurable, documented, future proofed codebase that does the wrong thing is useless.

At the end of the day, code is a general purpose tool, just like accounting or research and development. Code must solve real world problems of real people.

Sincerely,

Dan