Matt Ridley talks about ideas, and how we, the humans have created a world where each individual is assigned a task or an area of expertise and it’s expected to excel at it and hopefully take it further rather than try to be specialized in everything while having 0 innovation and minimum productivity.

As always i try to bring the paradigm to the IT world and if Matt Ridley says that ideas have sex in the world then in IT they have an ORGY!

If you have been around for a while, or if you know whats happening behind your screen right now you would be aware that ie in order for this website to get developed, hosted, and transmitted in front of you there is an involvement of hundreds, maybe thousands of people. I am not talking about just the myriads of people working at wordpress but i am talking about everyone, from the people laying out the optic fibre in oceans to the people working at my ISP, the people making CPUs, the people hosting this website, the people making the LCD screen that you are looking at…. you get my drift… EVERYONE.

Now, if we take each of these areas, noone really knows how his stuff works 100%, and let me break it down for you.

Do the people hosting the linux know how the kernel works?

No

Do the people laying out the optic fibre know how this cable works?

No

…Insert similar examples

What matters nowadays is not the singularity, the person, or the genius, but rather the collective effort of each and everyone of us in order to achieve goals. I was thinking that we are not that kind of a species and that as Richard Dawkins says, a Selfish Genome but it seems that is not the case.

Back to my world.

So, as a developer i was always thinking whether or not my difficulties with CSS and generally styling and aesthetics is justified, or a lack of traits. Furthermore, i have felt multiple times that people expect developers to be competent with styling while at the same time know the intricacies of relational databases, full text search, caching and what not. It’s 2 different realms of expertise and specialization, i can do it, but not as good as someone who’s specialized at it, so if i make the back end, and the designer the front end everyone wins something and that’s time, specialization and innovative momentum.

The fact is that our craft is young, like 50 or so years old(although i see some really old programming attempts) maybe in another 50 years we figure out exactly how we need to split responsibilities and make the best out of it.

• Outside-in Development with Cucumber and Rspec
• From cucumber github page, Tutorials and Related
• rcov and more behavior-driven development
• @smk railcasts about cucumber

I abandoned by old wordpress installation, it was just too bloated, with too few articles and i wasn’t as motivated to migrate it to my new host.

So, this time i ll go with a minimal design, the simpler, the better!

Let’s hope i ll be more active in blogging this time.- update: (it turns out i am not, suprise suprise!)