Verbs, not nouns
Defining oneself
I’m learning to refrain from defining myself with nouns. As Stephen Fry said, it’s liberating :
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I’m going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
(source)
I am not a software engineer, I do software engineering. I am not a sailor, I sometimes go sailing (those are easy).
Some are more complicated: it’s clear that I am a Dad – I’m not sure I can, or would want to, describe this with a verb. But isn’t refreshing to share my life with my wife, to love her, rather than being a husband ?
Using nouns to describe what we do is inaccurate because it hides the fact that what we do varies. I will do different things at different moments of the day, week, year and of course at different moments of my life. Using verbs rather than nouns acknowledges the fact that, despite doing different things at different moments, I am still the same person.
This means that deciding to continue doing, or stop doing, an activity, does not impact my identity. This means that I can build a stable identity, a stable sense of who I am that is independent of what I decide to do or not do. I can accept change in my life without feeling threatened.
Writing code
It’s curious to draw parallels between this idea of defining myself with verbs and the idea of defining my code with verbs rather than nouns.
Though I’m not the first to talk about this, I still wanted to share my thought on this: software is about automation. The point is to make a machine do something that we would otherwise want to do manually (which would be cumbersome and error-prone).
Therefore, software is about doing things and the added value of any piece of software is what it does, not what it is.
Putting verbs rather than nouns at the center of the design and architecture of software thus makes a lot of sense.