"Maybe There is a Better Way"

I recently presented at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper in Sydney, and although my talk was Stuff About CQRS, I opened with the slide 

My Object Today Is to Make You Think ... 'Maybe There is a Better Way'

(slides here)

The real focus of this was around how normal people think, and how unlike normal people we developers really are. My role in development is all about enabling better communication, because fundamentally I believe the real value a developer brings to a project is not technical, but is in the way they interact with the team, and more importantly with the normal people they are actually creating software for.

Obviously some of this has roots in DDD, the Ubiquitous Language is obviously an attempt to traverse this chasm that seems to exist between us.

Then I touched on user interfaces, and how they are so rarely designed the way people think - normal people think about their objectives and goals, not in terms of data like we developers do. Inductive UIs are focused on tasks, unlike the traditional data driven UIs that we tend to throw at users - users and people don't think in grids and columns and rows, they think "I want to change my address", not "open my customer record, edit the three fields under address and save to the database" - only a sadist or a developer would think that way.

And finally I touched on things like NoSQL databases, which neatly solve a communication problem - they stop us thinking about How to store information and let us focus on What we are storing and Why.

And lastly I tried to show the link between CQRS and these business problems - how it made you focus on the language, on tasks and objectives and how it let you detach the How from the What and Why.

But most importantly, what I was trying to do in that presentation was to throw some non-mainstream ideas out into the audience, to spark discussion and debate, and to get people to think - Maybe There is a Better Way  

If only a few of those in the audience went away and Googled some of the ideas I was talking about, it will be another step towards moving development away from it's heavy focus on technology and technological solutions - and towards a people and business driven focus, where technology is an artifact, not the deciding factor.