Dan Chudnov “more librarians need to be coders”.
I’ve
been meaning to link to some of Dan Chudnov’s essays for a while now.
He’s a librarian programmer, or a programmer with an MLIS, who works on
some pretty interesting tools. Unlike many other people who can
codeswitch between high-tech and low-tech aspects of the profession, he
hasn’t eschewed one for the other. In fact, he spends an awful lot of
time trying to bridge the gaps that exist. His work log should be on everyone’s rss feed list. The latest entry is about library development, not fundraising, but coding. Dan codes, for a library. Dan thinks more of us should learn to code. I’ll let him tell it.
There seem to be two levels operating here of relevance
to library types: First, you cannot afford to be slow, so whatever it
takes to learn how to do things faster and better. Second, don’t be
stupid about being faster and better – the means exist today to design
scalable platforms on top of scalable platforms, and tools on top of
tools. So you’d better know what you’re doing, and you’d better be good
at it. Or, you’d better know whom to emulate and take every possible
advantage of their good work when it can get you up your own curve.This
kind of message needs to be broadcast profession-wide – at the TLA
meeting this past April several audience members challenged my
assertion that “more of us need to be coders.” My response was, and
remains, that in the aggregate, our profession is borderline
incompetent w/r/to software development, and the more people we can get
who understand this stuff, the more likely our chances of basic
survival as an industry.