I’ve updated site sections with more explanation and grouping of posts from this blog.

• Concepts
• People
• Economics
• Systems
• Process

Dear Readers,

This June is the first anniversary of SoftwareCreation.org. I want to share few notes about this glorious event. I dreamed about having a blog for few years, but I didn’t want to spoil our great web space with just another miserable stream of poor writing. Even one year ago I had at least three good reasons why I shouldn’t blog:

• I’m not a native English writer. Prepositions and articles are still rocket science and source of troubles for me (Russian doesn’t have any articles at all). Composition of good English sentences is a serious mental endeavor. I love English, but I’m missing a lot of language nuances, idioms, abbreviation (e.g. WTF) and touching expressions that children learn from fairy tails, TV shows, mischievous friends and cursing adults. English is not music for my right brain, but hard parsing work for my overloaded left brain, at least now.
• I wasn’t born as a good writer. I don’t have natural talent to seamlessly compose beautiful flow of words that spark imagination, amaze people and make them forget about their work, wives and even computers. On the contrary, it is much easier for me to produce long boring and difficult to digest logical statements than to create masterfully prepared delicious food for your brains.
• I don’t know much. I live not too long, I didn’t read as much as I want, I know only fraction of what other people know and I didn’t experience many software projects.

These good reasons and my sanity didn’t stop me and I’ve started blogging. I wasn’t able to keep to myself my interest, amusement and passion for creating software.
Software development is much more than writing code for computers, implementing design patterns and algorithms (I should admit – this is very interesting part too).

• People. They add vibrant life into this dry process. Software development without people is similar to the birthday party without beer and guests. People bring power of human intellect, creativity and ability to solve impossible problems. But they add many exciting difficulties: we should understand each other, learn to work and think together and deal with our irrationality, personalities and feelings. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention that people write programs.
  
• Problems. Customers and users expect that software could solve their craziest wishes. And they are right – software becomes important part of our human civilization: it empowers businesses, science and societies, and makes life of kids and adults much more fulfilling (and entertaining). The problems become more wicked and interesting as we are building systems for unending people needs and push limits of what is possible for computers. Our civilization becomes hooked on software more than on oil, gas and coal. Therefore, civilization need smart guys who could deliver software for challenging demands to keep the whole world going :)
  
• Craft. Software development is one of the few remaining professions that still brings enjoyment of building the product from idea to a complete solution with own hands. This profession requires pride for own work and traditions of craftsmanship combined with high level of mastery, knowledge and skills. Good programmers are intelligent creators and masters and aren’t narrow-minded pluggable work units for solving purely technical tasks. Software development is so complicated that we won’t see serious competition from soulless AI soon.

What are results after one year?
52 posts, more than 45,000 visitors and more than 400 feed subscribers.

And I found much value for myself:

• Better knowledge - most of the articles are product of my learning. As I don’t know much, I find interesting questions and problems and try to answer for myself. In addition, presenting an answer for other people is much more challenging and require much deeper understanding. My blog is one of the best Universities for myself :)
  
• Improved communication – I’m becoming more comfortable with English and its expression power – my brains become tuned to this music and even sometimes cooperate to produce nice sentences. Also I learned that the way information is delivered determines what people will get and understand. I’m trying to enhance methods of delivery (visuals, concise ideas and better organization) and make my writing more approachable and interesting. And yes, I know, I’ll never be Shakespeare or Tolstoy, but I’ll be happy if people find something worth of their attention in this blog.
  
• More meaning – this blog adds more positive moments to my predictable and sometimes boring life. Opportunity to share, discuss ideas and connect to others people makes my life more meaningful and interesting. And this inspires me to spend more time writing than playing on a computer or drinking beer.
  

What do you think about this blog? What I can do to make it better?

My Dear Readers, thank you very much for your valuable time spent here! I’ll do what I can to make this blog worth even more time from your busy lives.

Happy birthday! Cheers…

Truly yours,
Andriy

P.S. I have another blog-related dream that I want to implement soon. I want to create separate blog where other people could share their stories about software projects, interesting situations and software development crowd, their managers and customers. What do you think? Does anybody want to share any stores? Please write me to andriy@softwarecreation.org if you are interested, have stories, comments or ideas about this new blog.

Dear readers,

I wish you happy, joyful and prosperous New Year! I sincerely wish and hope that in the New Year all your software projects will be in excellent shape, your customers will be very satisfied and you will feel as a happy, inspired and successful Software Creator the whole year!

2007 is the first year of this blog. And I still have to learn a lot to make the blog better and really useful for you. I want to highlight few articles that I believe were most interesting this year:

• Programmers are lazy capricious pseudo-intellectuals. Really? – why some management consultants could think that programmers are sloppy, disorganized and have hyper-inflated self-importance.
• How to Be Happy At Work. Short tutorial. – most jobs are not created to make us happy – what can we do ourselves to be happy at work?
• What is The Best Leadership Style for The Software Team? – review of four major leadership styles for software teams with pros and cons
• Do We Need Software Architects? 10 Reasons Why Not – 10 reasons why we don’t need non-programming decision-making software architects
• Evolutionary Software Architecture or Why Developers Are Not Janitors – what is effective architecture and overview of complex self-organized systems in this context
• Guide to Job Security for Software Developers: 15 Sure-Fire Methods – few strategies how to cope with job security – some are controversial :)
• Can Computers Beat Human Programmers? – 5 posts discuss if computers could replace human programmers
• Software Development is The Flow of Ideas. The Rest is Secondary – idea flow is one of the most important aspect of the software development
• The Mind of the Programmer. Anatomy and 3 Contradictions – uncovering contradictory biological mechanism behind human (and programmers) mind
• Software Requirements Are Elusive: 6 Reasons Why Customers Cannot Get Them Right – 6 psychological reasons why customers cannot predict what they will need from the software in the future
• Lost Personalities: How our company alters us – investigation how other people change our minds and make us behave differently

I write about everything what is interesting for me and can help to understand better people, systems and software development in overall. But certainly, it is not enough to make this blog interesting for you without your feedback. I want to take the opportunity to ask three questions:

• What did you like and find interesting in this blog?
• How can I make it better?
• What do you want to see here in the new year?

Thank you for your interest, patience and participation. Have great holidays and the rest of year!