Source Code has a Brief and Lonely Existence

This resource first appeared in issue #11 on 21 Feb 2020 and has tags Technical Leadership: Software Development, Strategy: Research to Development Maturity Ladder

Source Code has a Brief and Lonely Existence - Derek Jones

Derek Jones has an interesting blog where he takes data-driven looks at software and software development. Here he points out:

The majority of source code has a short lifespan (i.e., a few years), and is only ever modified by one person (i.e., 60%).

I think this is worth coming to terms with, particularly in terms of research computing and tool maturity. Most new ideas, as they get put into code, will stall out at the proof-of-concept or prototype stage. That’s good! It means lots of new ideas are being tried and then being passed up in favour of more promising ones. But it also means that effort going into proper “software engineering” (like non-crash error handling!) too early is effort likely wasted.

This is consistent with a blog post from last year about Software Is about Developing Knowledge More than Writing Code, by Li Hongyi; the idea that the real value of code is in what is learned (by the team and by those the team and disseminates the knowledge to) more than the code itself. Therefore, it helps to:

start as simple as possible
seek out problems and iterate
hire the best people you can

(Another good lesson from that one: Software is limited not by the amount of resources put into building it, but by how complex it can get before it breaks down)