Developer on Fire
Developer on Fire
Episode 057 | Ward Cunningham - Exceeding Expectations with Joy, Curiosity, and Discovery
Ward Cunningham is the American computer programmer who developed the first wiki and HyperCard. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham (commonly known by its domain name, c2.com), on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He pioneered ways of understanding object-oriented programming and patterns and innovated the design methodology of using class-responsibility-collaboration cards.
Chapters:
- - Dave introduces the show and Ward Cunningham
- - The nonlinearity of people and software that liberates the user
- - The philosophy of Wiki and open creativity and collaboration - also the problems of disingenuous use
- - Culture and science vs engineering
- - Ward and his correlation, longevity, and stamina in computing and software
- - The pain of earlier computing and personal computer revolution
- - "That was back in the day that fooling around would get you a job instead of a prison sentence."
- - Tricking a remote job entry system to do arithmentic and transforming representation - discovering refactoring
- - Creating "previously unimaginable things"
- - Ward's definition of value - big and small dents and supporting others
- - Ward's thoughts on patterns - satisfy the mundane so we can elevate our thinking to the level of our problems
- - Ward's story of failure - stopping short to keep failures small - failure to search for a library/package before starting implementation
- - The example of a developer on Node modules and versioning - drop things that don't work and only do the things that work out and do those really well
- - Ward's greatest success - Wiki
- - Wikipedia and changing the world - community capability and putting cognitive capacity to good use
- - The things that have Ward most excited
- - Ward's top 3 tips for delivering more value
- - Keeping up with Ward
- - Farewell
Resources:
- http://c2.com/
- WikiWikiWeb
- Portland Pattern Repository
- Class-Responsibility-Collaboration Cards
- Principle of Least Surprise
- Dave Thomas on Developer On Fire
- Mozilla View Source Conference
- Mozilla Virtual Reality
- Ray Tracing
- Five Things Old Programmers Should Remember
- Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN)
- The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web - Bo Leuf, Ward Cunningham
- Federated Wiki
- Creative Commons
- Federated Wiki on GitHub
- Federated Wiki Package on npm
Ward's top 3 tips for delivering more value:
1. The shortest path exceeding expectations rarely goes through meeting expecations
2. Recpect your own joy and curiosity and discovery
3. Be willing to give up all the work you've done before to find something better - there's something new and you're job is to discover it
