This blog was written quote a number of years ago (2013-2014), but I hadn’t published it. I got around to tidying it up a little. Enjoy.
As software developers we write code. The code is intended to represent what a computer should do for a business or person. Recently, I was caught in a scenario to make me think – all the code I was writing for a project, was representing what a computer should do for a computer, not for a business nor a person. That didn’t feel right to me, the business was still my client, not the computer. Warning signs flashed unanswered in my brain – I could picture the real customer would soon ask why the system was behaving in a slightly different way then they had prescribed.
I then thought about that term ‘writing code’ and wondered what it really means, centring around the following questions:
- Who do we write code for?
- Why do we write in code?
- What do we have to hide that requires us to write in code in the first place?