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Film Documents Software Creation
vasanth writes "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks with Geeks a story of intern programmers at New York-based Fog Creek Software creating a product from scratch to shipping, is now finished, one of the first films to delve wholly into the life and culture of coding. And though it may not be the next Harry Potter, it's an engaging film that focuses more on the personalities of the people than on the technology, bringing to life a process ordinarily wrapped in geek mystique."
It seems like everything today is being turned into a film or reality show. Not everything is exciting, especially coding a new project. In fact, that's probably one of the least exciting things they could have focused on.
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Revenge of the Nerds
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088000/
You must be new here. That has been Joel's modus operandi for months now. If he farts and writes about the delectible smell, it winds up on Slashdot.
You should talk to the guy elsewhere in this article thread who wonders why you should be into the geek culture to be a good software engineer. Your comment is EXACTLY why. I want someone with a passion who cares about what they're doing beyond just a paycheck and respect at the job when they're writing software or debugging it. I want someone who really cares about the whole process and the outcome and not someone who would rather half-ass it so they can make happy-hour with the other frat boys before all the hot chicks show up for jello shots.
First, does this movie feature
* Attractive girls, elsewhere than on computer screens?
* Humour, understandable by people who aren't living in their parents' basement?
* Action, more thrilling than tracing a memory leak in C program?
* Adventure, filing post-outsourcing job applications to mcdonalds not included?
* Love, relationships to chat bots not counted?
* Message, other than that life sucks and your imaginary girlfriend doesn't?
Slashdot doesn't have any of these, and yet people come here in droves. On a more serious note, there have been many movies that have done well without that, like "March of the Penguins". Obviously this isn't your typical blockbuster, but keep in mind that making a profit requires a lot fewer sales.
You've got to hand it to Joel: regardless of what you may think of his programming skills, he does have the art of shameless self-promotion down to a science.
Because those kind of people create crappy, uninspired software. The last thing I want to hear from a coworker is "Man, I don't even OWN a computer. When I go home, it's all about watching the football game and rock climbing!".
Why because they have a balanced life? Why does software have to be "inspired," it just has to function. Zealots can spend too much time including nice-to-have features than accomplishing the main objectives on schedule. You don't need to think about computers 24/7 to do a good job.
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This film is something I do every day... do I really want to watch it? I guess the only difference is that they'll probably cut out all of the meaningless web surfing, porn viewing, and IM'ing that I do at work...
Does it show things that are more important, like if the product actually makes money, or them going through the bug-fixing and customer service phase where their customers (if they have any) are screaming at them because of a bug, or they have a sales person yelling at them to get a feature in because they already closed a big deal telling the customer that they already have the feature in the software???
All I can say is I'm going to make sure to catch this ASAP - to try and determine whether I can send it out to family members so they can finally understand what exactly it is that I do every day.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
your, not you're ;)
Well, if programming is just a source of income for you, then the effort you put into it, and thus the quality of your code, probably won't be as good as the code produced by someone else, to whom programming is a hobby or a passion. In other words, if you actually enjoy programming, you will likely be a better programmer than someone who doesn't.