Tim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools

I gotta throw in one of my favorites, because I have not seen another that really speaks so directly to the value of craftsmanship in development. I also deeply enjoyed the allegory with woodworking tools. [VIDEO]

Must-see presentation (~1hour) for anyone interested in this topic is "Programming With Hand Tools" by Tim Ewald: [VIDEO]

There was a talk at Clojure/conj by Tim Ewald on just that: [VIDEO] "Programming with hand tools" Lots of conference reviews nominated it in their favourite talks too.

Can't help but mention this great video where an enthusiast woodworking engineer makes a parallel between tools in the real world and tools in computing: [VIDEO]

I also think it seems pretty appealing. There have been some interesting things on HN over the years about it. I loved this talk about how the tools you use determine how you look at problems (Tim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools) [VIDEO] And if you haven't seen him before, you're about to fall in love with Matthias Wandel: [LINK] [LINK]

I'm not a Closure coder but I loved this talk on how as your tooling becomes more complex and automated, you start to lose sight of simpler solutions to problems. It's all about woodworking! Tim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools [VIDEO]

Interesting presentation that explores your question. +1 intersection from this commenter. Tim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools [VIDEO]

Good article! Two things popped into my head when reading it. First the talk "Programming with Hand Tools" by Tim Edwald[0]. It's a very cool, entertaining talk with emphasis on the craftsmanship side of things and provokes thinking about which parts to automate (or maybe abstract away) and which parts to craft by hand when we're building stuff. Aside: also reminds me of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero project [1]. He is a strong advocate for structuring things bottom up and building them ourselves. [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] --- Secondly when reading this: > Regardless, the basic idea is that companies are often faced with the decision of doing N units of shitty work or far fewer than N units of great work. This is obviously oversimplified, but there is an important point that wants to emerge from this line of thought. As someone who grew up on open source, standardized technologies and the Web, I have been empowered to build a livelihood on Web development, mostly "self-taught" (or rather self-directed). All of this Web stuff is very accessible and gives you actual _leverage_. You can build something useful very quickly and the community around it is happy to share so much knowledge and work. I'm _very_ thankful for that. But I think as the wider web development community we're losing sight of what that essence is. We started to think of the Web as merely a vehicle for pure scale as in "how to reach the most people and annoy them with notifications" and "how to produce cheap sof