The article is a pretty helpful collection of examples, and I appreciate it.
The intro irks me, though:
> Software engineers are, if not unique, then darn near unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives; this however can come at a steep cost over time for people who constantly flit back and forth between different tools without investing the time to learn their own kit in depth. As someone with a healthy respect for the tacit knowledge of people better than me, I think a great 80/20 heuristic is “Learn the oldies first”: venerable Unix tools like cat, ls, cd, grep, and cut. (sed and awk, too, if you have the good fortune of landing yourself in an actual modern sysadmin role.)
This seems to be either naive or hubristic in light of the thousands of years of history of craftspeople building their own workspaces. Even a hobbyist woodworker will build plenty of jigs and fixtures for their work. Machinists as well. Anyone whose work comprises building things is readily capable of applying those skills to make their work easier
unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives
I think the key line is the ease in which we can create tools. A software engineer has free access to the lumber yard. Builders of old had to work hard to create tools to create tools.
On ease, much of what a woodworker needs can be built from wood and with basic hand tools, so the woodworker, by definition can build many of their own tools.
This is similar to programming, where much of what a programmer needs can be written in code.
On cost, simple observation of woodshops—including many in person and among acquaintances that are not professionals—has shown me that the cost is not prohibitive. Every shop I have seen includes a significant amount of self-built tools and fixtures.
Cost also explains the difference in programming environments I have seen. I have met a great many professional programmers, some of whom have no scripts directory or self-written tools, whose only programming output is their direct work product. This reflects the fact that professional-grade tools are available for free to programmers.
As individuals, my observations lead me to understand woodworkers as much more likely to use their skills to build tools for themselves. The same holds true of other craftspeople I have had the opportunity to observe; even in small, one-off projects, it is common to use elements of the craft to build a tool or otherwise aid the endeavor in a way that is not directly producing the work product.
As a collection, I would agree that programmers build tools that allow us to do our work better. The open source community is incredible. Because of the collective action and the cost to individuals, it is much less common for those individual programmers to have to write tools for themselves.
I would argue that it is similarly easy, but circumstances lead to these disparate outcomes.
A woodworker will also just try stuff. They will also first lay out some specs and then start out to fill those specs. One step a time.
While not TDD by the letter, many crafts work more or less agile, and more or less incremental.
An example: I'm currently cutting down some 15 trees (Elms, died of Elm Blight). While it's impossible to cut down a single tree using TDD, I do cut them down incrementally, agile and in small steps: start out with the smallest tree (that stands alone) see how it reacts. Don't plan too far ahead, but plan a little - escape route, sharpen the chains etc. TDD wise: delivery criteria is "wood on a safe, manageable pile".
(I halted the moment a funny little owl peeked out of one of the trees, annoyed. Apparently it was building a nest and I'm too late in the season. Also agile)
Most traditional construction was done with green wood, in fact, and there is a whole bunch of furniture making and other fine work that can be done with green wood. Much carving and turning is preferable on green wood, as it works more easily than dry.
And in fact, testing is one of the most widely shared pieces of advice among woodworkers I have seen working and met. If there is more than one of any cut to be made, it is customary to build a custom jig to hold the work, then test on scrap to ensure all is correct. After work pieces are all in or near their final shape, it is typical to do a dry fit: put the entire (or some substantial subassembly of the) finished product together without glue or fasteners to ensure it does fit. Iteration and small tests which allow for fast failure and early correction are a longstanding tradition in woodworking, much longer than in programming.
In my personal experience, working professionally as a programmer and as a hobbyist in woodwork, I have been much more impressed by the degree to which woodworkers build their own tools to support their workflows than by programmers. This holds up among individuals I know personally, discussions I have followed online, and popular personalities I have been exposed to.
If you follow discussions and developments in both communities, it becomes clear that the difference is not the ease with which one can build tools to make their work better, but the price at which programmers can get professional-grade tools for the same purpose.
BSD and Linux are free. Hyper-powered text editors are free. Most programming languages are free. Postgres (and a plethora of other, databases) is free. Compilers, debuggers, package management, CI/cd tools, collaboration tools are all available for free.
As for the availability of raw materials for building such tools to improve work, that is a question of cost, not ease. It is certainly easy to build tools for a woodworker, and the cost is not prohibitive, based on the observation that every woodshop I have seen has a significant amount of tools and fixtures built by the worker.
The intro irks me, though:
> Software engineers are, if not unique, then darn near unique in the ease with which we can create tools to improve our own professional lives; this however can come at a steep cost over time for people who constantly flit back and forth between different tools without investing the time to learn their own kit in depth. As someone with a healthy respect for the tacit knowledge of people better than me, I think a great 80/20 heuristic is “Learn the oldies first”: venerable Unix tools like cat, ls, cd, grep, and cut. (sed and awk, too, if you have the good fortune of landing yourself in an actual modern sysadmin role.)
This seems to be either naive or hubristic in light of the thousands of years of history of craftspeople building their own workspaces. Even a hobbyist woodworker will build plenty of jigs and fixtures for their work. Machinists as well. Anyone whose work comprises building things is readily capable of applying those skills to make their work easier