I was chatting with Keith about what the Software Craftsmanship event should really be about, in the context of a discussion of whether some of Jason Gorman’s list of guitar heroes are actually worth listening to (you still with me?) 1.
The next obscure piece of evidence is Maurice Murphy’s YouTube masterclass. For those who don’t know, Maurice Murphy has been Principal Trumpet in the London Symphony Orchestra for years (nerds without an interest in orchestral music will nonetheless have heard him on the Star Wars sound tracks). What’s interesting about the video is that what they emphasise most is being musical, making sense of the melody. They have no interest in pyrotechnics and assume that the student knows the basics.
The (barely sustainable) link with master-level coding and performance, we realised, is that both are about being expressive. The master coder/performer has a point of view and they use their considerable technical skills to get it across. The code that really impresses me is almost entirely about the domain, it just reads well. Most of the code most of us see, however, is stuck a level below, I have to read through the implementation to get to the meaning.
Years ago an old friend of mine said that when she first started going to conferences she wouldn’t be impressed by some of the big names because what they said was obvious. Later, she learned that being obvious can be really hard.
1) Disclaimer I never was into rock guitar heroes, so Jason’s post was a bit academic for me.