The Song of Software

I am sorely tempted to do another New Beginnings piece this week, in light of yesterday's events, but Sourabh is probably right…. So let's talk about… software, today. In the early days, programs came in plastic baggies with mimeographed (ask your mother) instructions stapled to a little cardboard hangar/label. You would take your new (huge) floppy disk—disk is magnetic, by the way, disc is optical—home and crank up your computer, tear open the baggie and load the software in much more time than it takes to talk about it, today.

And you would probably read the pages about how the program worked. These pages were often written by the programmer himself, some featuring hand-drawn diagrams. So clarity was never assured. Still, most programs only did a handful of things, and there were only a handful of ways to adjust or personalize or work with them. And so learning an entire program wasn't a big investment in time or effort.

Then e-mail happened, and it was suddenly easy to write to a program's author, asking, "Hey, could you add a spelling checker?" and "How about a button that made text italic?" and other features. Some programmers took offense at these suggestions. Their Art was nearly perfect, as it was. The more heads-up programmers, however (today we call these gentlemen, millionaires) added these and other features to subsequent releases, and learned people would pay for these updates. They'd pay a lot. And so Program became Program 2.0, Program 2.1, Program 2.32 and Program 3. We flirted briefly with Program Pro and Program98, Program2000 and iProgram and so on. Oh yes. People would pay and pay and pay for the promise of a better, faster and more feature-laden version of the program they already owned.

So today we have programs that can do all kinds of things. You can watch TV in your word processor. You have to think that by the time you add a feature like that, you pretty much have spell checking and italics figured out, right?

But there's a problem with jamming feature on top of feature into what should be and once was a simple program. A great many of these improvements go undiscovered, unnoticed and thus, unused. People end up paying for word processors that are better than the original page-layout programs of a generation ago, and yes, they end up paying a lot, for hundreds of features they will never use.

This is why I have always been an advocate of noodling. You know, that mindless "I wonder what this does" kind of playing with a program. You know that last five or ten minutes of the morning, when you're essentially done working and just waiting for a coworker to get off the phone so you can go to lunch? That's a perfect time to noodle around with a program. Fire up a blank page and throw some text on it and see what happens, see how this works, see if you can un-do that. Make it green. Make it bigger. Move it to the other side of the page.

Remember, software is a tool. By itself it can't really do anything. It's only your own skill, talent and imagination that makes a program worth anything. Tom Clancy wrote The Hunt for Red October with MacWrite. Not even MacWrite Pro. Mark Twain used a typewriter and Ludlum never got beyond using a #2 pencil. Just because you paid $500 for a word processor doesn't mean it will write a best seller for you. And just because you paid $125 for Dreamweaver CS4, that doesn't mean you will become a World-Class Web Designer.

Resolve now to learn a little more about your craft and your tools, this year. I'll help you. We'll help each other. Let's try to pick up one new thing every week or so and we can look back on 2009 as a year that was full of meaningful, positive change. A year when we learned to do more, better, and in less time, to open ourselves to the possibility that there may be several ways to accomplish the same task, and that some of these ways are better than others. Let's build on what has come before and build a skill set and portfolio that lets us hold our heads high in the company of Real Talent.

Yes, we can.