I heard the Indigo Girls song Galileo this morning. It’s not their best song, in my opinion, but it’s among their most popular. The song evokes Galileo as a symbol of the highest achievement of human intellect: How long till my soul gets it right? / Can any human being ever reach the highest light? / I call on the resting soul of Galileo / King of night vision, king of insight. Lyricist Emily Saliers employs Galileo as a metaphor for the search for meaning.

The song got me thinking about Galileo. I idolized great scientists and mathematicians and inventors when I was young, and Galileo certainly belongs on that list. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking wrote: “Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science” – who am I to argue with Stephen Hawking?

But Galileo wasn’t on my Top 10 list. I knew of him, as kids do, as the inventor of the telescope (which, of course, he wasn’t). But my intellectual idol was Leonardo da Vinci.

I don’t mean to embark upon a debate over which of these great thinkers made the more important or substantial contributions to the modern world. Such debates are pointless at best. No, what I find interesting about my childhood preference for da Vinci is what it reveals about the way we encounter and assimilate information. I want to talk about that today. And that means I’m going to have to delve into the past a bit.

My dad was a rookie newspaper reporter when I was a kid, and my mom stayed home with a house full of toddlers. I was too young to know it at the time, but looking back, it’s clear that we didn’t have any money. My childhood was spent in a series of undersized rentals filled with hand-me-down furniture. Other kids got all the latest toys, but my sisters and I did without.

I recognize now that my mom and dad had to scrimp and save to maintain our rowdy household. But in one area, they spent like millionaires. I grew up in a house full of books. I mean it – there were books everywhere. Thousands of books, hardcover and paperback, filling shelves in every room. My dad, who never owned a new car in his life, was so idealistic he got his kids not one, but three sets of encyclopedias.

You remember encyclopedias, right? They were big multiple-volume reference works packed with articles on all kinds of topics: art, history, science, mythology, math…every branch of human knowledge. We had the Encyclopedia Americana, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the World Book Encyclopedia. (Plus, as I recall, the beautiful Time-Life Science and Nature series of stand-alone volumes on individual topics.) These weren’t picture-book references for kids, but full-scale grown-up reference works of the kind typically owned by libraries. Each was more than 20 oversize hardcover volumes. I’ll never know how my parents were able to afford them.

These (and many other wonderful reference works) didn’t appear when I learned to read, nor when I started school, nor when my academic assignments began to require research. No, they were there from the beginning. And my parents didn’t put them away on a high shelf to protect the onion-skin pages and leather bindings. The encyclopedias were on the bottom shelf so we toddlers could browse through them at will, starting before we could read. By the time I entered first grade, I had spent hundreds of hours with those encyclopedias. I had probably read 1,000 articles. (I’ll make no claim regarding the depth of my understanding.)

In some ways, my unfettered access to these thousands and thousands of pages of reference material was similar to my current access to information on the Internet. But the information differed in one significant way.

On the Internet, I can launch a query and obtain links to scores of relevant documents. With encyclopedias, access was alphabetical by topic. I couldn’t ask the encyclopedias of my childhood for a list of the Top 10 contributors to modern science. I could learn about Galileo only by picking up the G volume and flipping to the appropriate page. If I wasn’t looking for Galileo, I wouldn’t encounter him.

I think that’s why I was a confirmed da Vinci loyalist. I knew about da Vinci, because I had happened upon his entries in the reference books. I’m sure the pages devoted to da Vinci were illustrated with his drawings and paintings, which would have caught my younger self’s attention. In fact, I remember studying da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (this link is well worth following).

I think it’s reasonable to conclude that Emily Saliers, who is about my age, happened to stumble onto different articles in her childhood exploration of history’s great thinkers. She bumped into Galileo, and I found da Vinci. It’s as simple as that. In the age of the printed word, chance and happenstance could have lifelong repercussions.

I have begun thinking about how today’s children will embark upon their intellectual quests, and what the lifelong results will be. The Internet is an unorganized heap of questionable facts and articles of dubious merit. My encyclopedias were produced by professionals with resources for fact-checking and a commitment to objectivity, neither of which is a strong point of the Web. But the Internet’s searchability means it can provide meaningful answers to broad, naïve questions. If you can pry the kids away from YouTube and Facebook, they just may find exploring the Internet just as rewarding, and life-changing, as my own encounters with printed references.

Oh, and about the encyclopedias. I’m sure my parents intended for them to serve as long-term resources for my academic career. But I quickly found that these secondary resources are not held in high esteem in the academic world. The pursuit of knowledge led me to consult original works rather than the encyclopedias’ condensed summaries of the works. So I outgrew them fairly quickly.

I am grateful to my parents for making the encyclopedias and other references available to me as a child. Browsing through a house full of books led me to a fulfilling information addiction, an addiction I feed now through Chrome and a broadband connection. I’m sad that today’s children won’t have the same experience.

They’ll learn to acquire knowledge in a different way, through a searchable, highly responsive broadband Internet. I wonder what effect that difference will have on the way they think, decades from now.

Web recommendation: I love Jeff Duntemann. I seem to recall that the two of us had a falling out, long ago, when we were editors of rival magazines, but I can’t remember the details now. Duntemann is a superb writer and a careful thinker. When I stumbled across his blog the other day, I realized how much I had missed reading his editorials and articles. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He intends to make a lot of ice cream this summer.

I read a lot of programming blogs these days. It’s amazing what you can find out about people who think no one will ever read what they post on the Internet. What they have for breakfast, why they regret their college educations, how their employers are totally blowing it…any random thing at all.

I’ve noticed one interesting trend. Many developers prefer to listen to music while they are working. They post some fascinating playlists.

Most developers who listen to music while programming say they opt for music without lyrics. That makes sense to me – who wouldn’t find lyrics a distraction? Beyond that, the variety is wide. I’ve run across bloggers who listen to classical music, movie soundtracks, techno, jazz, klezmer(!), baroque organ music, opera, and bossa nova. Some people listen to retro video-game music. (Hey, there’s no accounting for taste.) And many, many programmers say they are more productive when listening to metal. Honestly, Metallica is probably the most frequently cited band on programmers’ blogs.

Me, I can’t listen to anything while I’m doing creative work. I did my best programming in the early, early morning, before the rest of the world had awakened, when it was just me and the keyboard. Now, when I’m writing, I have a terrible time focusing if there’s music playing. For me, focus is too fragile to survive an encounter with music.

So what’s your story? Do you write code with headphones on? Or do you, like me, find that silence is golden? Let me know in the comments.

Web recommendation: I’m writing this piece on March 19, 2012. It happens to be the 538th birthday of patent law, according to this interesting and informative page. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He doesn’t have much of an appetite these days – must be the lingering effects of that headcold.

We all know that women are a minority in software development. This bothers us because it's not consistent with how we view the development world. In the ideal profession that exists in our minds:

• All coders have an equal opportunity to be hired – all that matters is the quality of their work.

• Once on the job, developers are treated fairly regardless of gender, race, and other factors – all that matters is the quality of their work.

• Compensation and advancement are awarded fairly in proportion to developers' contributions – all that matters is the quality of their work.

In other words, we view the world of software development as an open meritocracy.

The truth is more complicated. White men are hired disproportionately over other candidates with equal qualifications. Women programmers are widely subjected to discrimination and hostile work environments. And women are under-compensated and under-promoted compared to equally qualified men. We don't want to believe these things, but study after study confirms them. These are the facts.

According to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, women make up 58 percent of the workforce, but only 25 percent of the computing workforce. Between 2000 and 2009, the the percentage of women in the computing workforce dropped 13 percent, while the percentage of men in computing increased 11 percent.

A study by the London Business School revealed that software development teams are most innovative and efficient when they are composed of 50 percent men and 50 percent women. Any other ratio yields lower innovation and lower efficiency. Yet women remain under-represented.

Most of us are uncomfortable with these truths. We'd like to alter the reality to make it conform with our ideals.

Initiatives to open our field to full participation by women have largely been of two kinds.

Some address the “pipeline problem.” The idea is that women are under-represented in high-tech careers because our colleges and universities prepare too few qualified female candidates. Proposed solutions to the pipeline problem can be very inventive. Some activists start with research showing that boys and girls accept gender roles as toddlers, and advocate a wholesale revolution in the way society regards femininity. More commonly, activists attack the pipeline problem by creating incentives for young women to choose technical majors in college.

The second major focus has been networking. Women in tech have formed myriad organizations to provide information and support to other women. These peer-support organizations have attracted high-profile advocates, women who have beaten the odds and ascended to executive positions in high-tech firms.

Neither of these approaches can eliminate the systematic exclusion of women from an equal role in software development. To welcome women into our field – and make our teams more innovative and efficient as a happy result – we must start by accepting the truth about the barriers that currently exist. Then we must change the world. By changing ourselves.

Web recommendation: Unlikely, creative, outstanding nerdy projects! I love this site. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He woke up unaccountably happy this morning. Don't you love it when that happens?

Conventional wisdom has it that we should pursue careers that allow us to spend our work-time doing what we love. It's common sense, right? Work is the biggest part of our lives, in terms of hours spent. We spend more waking hours on the job than with our families. So if we are happy and fulfilled at work, then we have taken a big step toward having happy and fulfilling lives.

This idea that work should be personally fulfilling is a modern notion. My grandfather loved books and opera, but spent his life doing bookkeeping and statistical calculations for insurance companies. Men of his generation understood that work was a sacrifice. They undertook the burden of having a career in order to provide for their families. The fulfillment came from having family lives.

My father didn't follow his bliss into a career either. As he told the story, he fell into his career as a result of being drafted. He was stationed in Okinawa, Japan during the Korean War. It was hot and muggy, and recruits were expected to march around all day wearing heavy packs. But my dad noticed that reporters for the base newspaper carried nothing heavier than a notepad. And their offices were air conditioned. So he volunteered for a position as a reporter. When his stint in the army was up he went to journalism school on the G.I. Bill, and that led to his career as a newspaper editor. I think he came to love the work, but that was just luck. He originally chose journalism as an alternative to real work.

Today, of course, we all feel entitled to fulfillment. Not just in our personal lives, but at work. Career counselors starting in high school tell us to figure out what we love doing, and to pursue careers that let us do it. The best life, we are told, comes from being paid to do what we would happily do for free.

I am not convinced. This advice strikes me as simplistic and even misleading.

My first job was in a doughnut shop. I was hired one summer as a temporary replacement for a “counter girl” who was on pregnancy leave. I poured coffee, served doughnuts, and made change when customers paid. I was a very serious amateur musician in those days, and I loved literature and philosophy. No career counselor would have advised a career in the doughnut biz to my teenaged self.

But you know what? I loved the job. I enjoyed the camaraderie with other employees. I took pride in keeping the counter clean and tidy. I got to know the regular customers, many of them professors from the local college, and made a point of having their orders waiting for them when they sat at their preferred spots. The better I anticipated their needs, the more I earned in tips. And at the end of every week I got a paycheck to spend as I liked. I really, really loved that job.

I couldn't have followed my bliss into that job in the doughnut shop, but it turns out that it was perfect for me at the time. I've had a lot of jobs since then, and I have loved almost all of them. But most of them came from luck, from happenstance, from coincidence.

If I had self-consciously set out to find a job that would make me happy, I would have been limited by my history of situations and jobs that had made me happy in the past. I would never have begun programming, and I would never have left programming for journalism. My willingness to pursue opportunities without knowing in advance that I would find fulfillment there has led me on a convoluted career path, but there is very little, looking back, that I would change.

So I don't accept “do what you love” as good career advice. It will certainly prevent you from learning more about what you love and what you don't. It limits your career options to extensions of jobs you have had and loved before. And I think it reverses the focus in a harmful way, discounting the power of attitude and minimizing personal accountability. My advice is this: Don't do what you love. Love what you do.

Web recommendation: This 2009 post from blogger Rob Diana – Why do you write code? – does a good job of listing the reasons developers find their careers fulfilling. (Hint: It has nothing to do with fancy workplaces or free soft drinks.) J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He lunched today on a pot of lentils, which always reminds him of Jacob and Esau.

For a few months now, I've been intending to comment on a short essay by SD Times blogger Victoria Reitano. Maybe you remember it. Reitano posted “Software development: manufacturing process or creative idea?” from Salt Lake City's Agile 2011 conference back in August. The title caught my eye immediately. Reitano's question is a variant of a classic recurring debate: Programming: Art or science? It seems like everyone has taken a shot at this question at one point or another:

• Blog post: Knuth: Computer programming as an art

• Question on Object Mix forum: Is programming/computer science an art or a science?

• MSDN article by Stanley B. Lippman, circa 2006: Is programming an art?

• Slashdot discussion: Is programming art?

• Net Objectives blog post by Bob Hartman: Is programming an art or a science?

• Follow-up post by Bob Hartman: Is programming an art or a science? (Part II)

• Blog post by Aater Suleman: Is programming an art or a science?

• CodingForums.com discussion thread: Programming: An art or science?

• CatsOnKeyboards.com blog post: Programming: Art, not science

• Rebuttal to Lippman's MSDN article: Dear Stanley B. Lippman

• Blog post by Rodrigo Monteiro: Programming is art

• Blog post at O'Reilly's ONLamp.com: Is programming art?

• Discussion thread at </dream.in.code>: Programming: A science or an art?

• Knuth's original essay (PDF): Computer programming as an art

If you think I'm going to wade into this debate, you're crazy. The problem is that the question, as framed, doesn't allow for a sensible answer.

You want to know what programming is? It's...a creative discipline. I know, because it tickles the same part of my brain that is tickled by other creative disciplines.

When I was young, I had very serious musical ambitions. I did a fair bit of composing. You know what I liked about it? The combination of rigor and complexity. Musical composition requires mastery of a hugely complex set of rules, some inherent in nature and some established more arbitrarily through centuries of tradition. Despite the thousands of rules, composers are expected to exercise immense creativity. In fact, creativity is a sine qua non for achievement in musical composition.

Architecture is much the same. Those who design buildings must first master in-depth knowledge of materials, structural relationships, and historical precedent, all of which are more or less binding upon their subsequent efforts. Yet within these bounds, they must employ their creative senses to create aesthetic affects.

I think that even chess-playing is a creative discipline, at a certain level of seriousness. The would-be grand-master must internalize a complex set of more or less arbitrary rules, then deploy his pawns and pieces according to an overall strategy that can only be described as artistic.

Cooking and the writing of fiction rely upon similar mixes of complex conventions and an aesthetic element based on creativity.

Human brains – at least the brains of computer programmers, composers, architects, chess players, cooks, and writers – are drawn to tasks that conform to this mix of requirements. The essential elements are complexity, rigorous rules, and the opportunity for creative expression.

We programmers like to think of ourselves as a unique branch of humanity, spawned mere decades ago along with the microprocessor. But that isn't the case. Our love of complexity, rigor, and creativity makes us more, not less, human.

Web recommendation: I love the blogs at SD Times and I feel honored to have a home here. If you're looking to do some reading, you could scarcely do better than browsing the archives here – even before I joined the team a few months ago, the nuggets among these posts were pithy and frequent. But if you find that you have additional time and curiosity, then you simply must check out the blog network at Scientific American. These posts are funny, serious, timely, in-depth, provocative, and relevant. Be warned – if you dip your virtual toe into these waters, you may find yourself drawn in like Hylas among the nymphs. The Scientific American blog directory is here. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He likes pizza, but who doesn't?

You probably can't tell, but I spend four or five hours of research for every hour I spend writing these posts of mine. I consider the research overhead – as a longtime computer-industry journalist, I know that I need to stay on top of multiple trends and technologies so I can comment intelligently on new developments. Heck, I have to stay informed just so I'll recognize a comment-worthy development when it happens.

I do this research the way you do, I suppose. I make massive use of my browser's “Open in new tab” feature. When my computer starts wheezing, I know it's out of RAM and swapping pages to disk, so I stop and read a few pages, closing the 95 percent of the tabs that don't merit follow-up. Then I return to new-tab mode.

This probably isn't the optimal way to do research. If my deadlines were more pressing, I'd be more scientific about it. But I enjoy the odd side-trips my research method affords me. As the marvelous John Crowley points out in an old book I love dearly, sometimes the snake's hands in a story are the best part.

But I am digressing. What I want to write about is hiring.

Today's Web-meandering led me to an article called “How do startups hire the right people?” Before the page had finished loading, I had mentally composed a rebuttal to serve as today's SDTimes blog post.

It was the phrase “the right people” that got me riled up. I have a visceral reaction to the idea that we can divide the world's people into desirable and undesirable. I abhor the widespread belief that native talent accounts for the (very real) productivity differences among software developers.

My experience is that the right environment can coax superprogrammer results out of developers who would do average work in an average environment. I passionately believe that we are much better off improving our workplaces – the physical plan, the philosophy, the training, the systems – than searching for coding superstars. If we build supportive workplaces, organizations that encourage flow, then we don't have to ask the HR department to do magic. We can create programming stars instead of hoping to stumble across them in a stack of CVs.

Well. It appears I have stumbled over a soapbox. Occupational hazard, I suppose.

I'll say much more about this in a future post.

As for the article that inspired this little rant, it turns out to be innocuous. It wasn't the elitist diatribe I was expecting. It's an entirely defensible article that makes a good point. I'm not linking to it because it's way off-topic. Or, more precisely, I am way off-topic. Whatever.

Web recommendation: Dr. Anna Akbari's presentation at a recent TED conference hit me very close to home. She examines, in a studious way, the relationship between the technologies that are consuming much more of our waking hours and the effects on our quality of life. I love it that she moves past the usual hand-waving and provides some real data and on-target recommendations. Good stuff. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He hopes his last words are the same as those of Steve Jobs, as reported by his sister: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

The Data.gov site has been live for a few months now, and it's turned out to be quite an interesting resource. The Obama administration should really be commended for getting this operation up and running in such a short time. For those who've not seen it, this is basically a data repository for Americans to use as they see fit. In an uncharacteristically governemental fashion, the site describes itself quite succinctly:

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

Just about every major enterprise in America can find info here that can be put to use. This is probably the only time I've ever felt like my tax dollars are being used for good!

The nominations for this year's SD Times 100 are now open. There's an excellent write-up, explaining just what these awards are intended to do, Here. There is also a FAQ on the process. After you've familiarized yourself with the criteria, you can vote for your favorite buzz-worthy software development tools.

This is always an interesting process, and we usually have a few surprises each year, along with some obvious choices. Feel free to nominate popular open source projects, such as Eclipse. Potentially, open source companies that offer service and support would qualify, also. But we generally prefer those companies to offer some sort of development tools, so keep that in mind.

There's a nice list of past winners, for those looking for inspiration.

We really appreciate all of our reader nominations. It makes a big difference to us, as you are the folks who are using these tools, after all.