William Banfield

Software engineering is the discipline of building tools that never ever break. You can build hammers that are infinitely copyable and in effect, infinitely durable. Wow, amazing, that seems like only a good thing! While, in many ways this is great news, it does have some extremely pernicious problems. For sake of illustration, let’s take our hammer analogy to a totally bizarre place. Let’s imagine that you are in charge of maintaining this special software hammer.

Let’s talk about ‘stuff’ Modern American life seems to be full of ‘stuff’. Little tchotchkes and chargers and adapters and flash drives and scarves and hats and creams and pastes and rewards cards and coins and remotes and keys and on and on. The amount of ‘stuff’ that permeates every aspect of life is enough to make one’s head spin. And, if you’re at all like me, every end table and dresser top seems to be a wonderful breeding ground for ever more stuff: The ‘stuff’ is remultiplying almost daily.