On my twitter bio, I describe myself as:
a Lovelacologist for portable transactators
which is, in keeping with the way I’m dressed in the avatar pic, a steampunk way of saying that I’m a programmer of mobile computers. But is that strictly true, or fair? It’s what I’ve spent most of the last couple of years doing, but then I’ve also worked on:
- web servers
- SMPP servers
- one particle accelerator
- workstation apps
- desktop apps
- administration scripts
- books
and there’s bound to be more things that I haven’t remembered. I don’t think I’m alone in picking quite a narrow definition to expose as “me” (though maybe I should have thought a bit harder before titling this blog). Social scientists refer to this as “doing identity work”, the effort we go to to control the definition of who we are in interactions with others. To confirm this choice of narrow identity work, here’s a not-quite-random look at excerpts from a few other Twitter bios (anonymised for no real reason):
- iOS, OS X, BMWs, photography, and food.
- App developer by day – Apple fanboy by night
- now a Clojure and Ruby programmer
- iOS Developer
It’s interesting that while we choose these restricted “brands” for ourselves, we actually spend a lot of time solving the same problems. I’ve been working on another web app project lately, and it’s remarkably similar to building a mobile app. Even a lot of the constraints are similar:
- keep the event loop fast
- avoid loading lots of large data files
- maintain separation of concerns between modules
- try to minimise power consumption
and indeed the solutions turn out to be similar too. The command bus introduced in an earlier post, perfect for (and, according to some readers, informing their own work in) mobile apps, was actually built for this web app project. The problems and the solutions turn out to be interchangeable.
What we need is more of this interchangeability. Rather than waiting for a mobile person to say in a mobile way how to write mobile software, we can take advantage of what people have already said in a software way about how to write software. I have resolved to widen my horizons, and pay broader attention to what my colleagues are up to.
