Years Too Late

I’ve been unemployed for eight months now, and haven’t written as much as I thought I would. Middle-aged angst is one reason, but another is the realization that most of the projects I was thinking of doing are solving yesterday’s problems. I have a long history of doing this: The JavaScript and Python versions of Software Design by Example are the books I needed in the 2000s when I was teaching undergraduate courses at the University of Toronto. I’m proud of them, but they have essentially found no readers. Similarly, Research Software Engineering with Python would have been really useful if it had appeared in 2012 or 2013. By the time it came out in 2021, most of what it said was already online in a hundred places (thanks in part to Software Carpentry). By the time we shut down It Will Never Work in Theory I had learned enough to write an introductory textbook on software engineering that would show readers what we actually know about software development and (just as importantly)…