A new entry in the wandering book has been sighted, this time from Dave Hoover!

I particularly liked his post because he takes Jason Gorman’s and Corey Haines’s entries creating a conversation out of them putting his own ideas into it.

This entry actually made me think about our craft and how it is been practiced, even in our surroundings.

Software Craftsmanship is not only about coding alone; coding is the baseline of it. If we do craft code, we obviously have to practice coding over and over, pushing the limits and learn.

The main difference I see with other communities is that we, the software craftsmanship community, try to have close contact with each other, trying to help in the long road we have chosen to walk. This is a very important factor about our community and how we interact with each other, we are colleagues, we are friends.

Some people though don’t think that way, and regard coding as the only way. The problem of that approach is that we will go back in time again to what I always called the Neanderthal Developer. This kind of developer is a very high profile developer (most of them are), but gives a damn about any community and will only be part of it as long as he can learn for himself something. These are the guys that prefer to code alone in their own cubicle ghetto and think that the projects they are working on are good as long as the code alone is good.

Crafting code is just the baseline of software craftsmanship, a very important one, I agree, but it is just the base on which the rest of what software craftsmanship means rests on. Just take a look at the manifesto and you will realise that only the first value is actually talking about code!

If our community does not focus on the rest of the values that we all signed on, we are not being any better than anyone else; maybe we just care more about the code, but that is a very sad proposition.

Steadily adding value, a community of professionals and productive partnerships all happen outside the code arena, and it is our responsibility, as software craftsmen, to lead by example, foster communication and share.