I’ve started another book project: APPosite Concerns is in the same series as, and is somehow a sequel to, APPropriate Behaviour. So now I just have one question to ask.
What is going to be in the book?
This question is easy to answer in broad terms. My mental conception of who I am and how I make software is undergoing a Narsil-like transformation: it has been broken and is currently being remade.
APPropriate Behaviour was a result of the build-up of stresses that led to it being broken. As I became less and less satisfied with the way in which I made software, I explored higher and higher levels looking for meaning. Finally, I was asking the (pseudo-)profound questions: what is behind software development? How does one philosophise about it? What does it mean?
If APPropriate Behaviour is the ascent, then APPosite Concerns is an exploration of the peak. It’s an exploration of what we find when nothing is worth believing in, of the questions we ask when there is really no understanding of what the answers might be.
It’s clear to me that plenty of the essays in this blog are relevant to this exploration, but of course there’s not much point writing a book that’s just some articles culled from my blog. There needs to be, if you’ll excuse a trip into the world of self-important businessperson vocabulary for a second, some value add.
I’ve written loads recently. As I said right here, I write a lot at the moment. I write to get ideas out of my brain, so that I can ignore them and move on to other ideas. Or so that I can get to sleep. I write on a 1950s typewriter, I write on loose leaf paper, I write in notebooks, I write in Markdown files.
I know that there’ll be plenty in there that can be put to good use, but which pieces are the valuable ones? Is it the fictionalised autobiography, written in the style of a Victorian novel? The submitted-and-rejected science fiction short about the future of the United Nations? The typewritten screed about the difficulties of iOS provisioning? The Platonic dialogue on the ethics of writing software?
One thing that’s evident is that a reorganisation is required. Blogs proceed temporally, but books can take on any other order. The disparate essays from my collection are related: indeed given the same emotional state, any given subject trigger leads me to the same collection of thoughts. I could probably recreate any of the articles in SICPers not from memory, but from the same initial conditions. There’s a consistent, though evidently evolving, worldview expressed in my recent writing. Connecting the various parts conceptually will be useful for both of us.
[By the way, there will eventually be a third part representing the descent: that part has in a very real sense not yet been written.]
