What is this?
How I Feel began as a "Let me show you in one hour what software development really is about." and turned out to be much more...
Hello World
When my daugther came home from school, it was clear that the introduction to software development they were given hadn't been... motivating. It was so unrepresentative for what software development actually is about, that it was understandable that these kids weren't really interested. Adding two numbers is so far away from what they perceive as software. I can't save the world, but I can at least save one daugther's programming soul.
Live Coding
So I was going to do some live coding, while she sat alongside of me, showing how a real piece of software comes about. The focus was not on the actual lines of code, but rather on showing what it looks like to develop software, what thoughts go through your head and what things you need to think about before you can build someting like...
Social Network
... the smallest possible social network, since if there is one piece of software my daugther knows, it's a social network. A micro-social network. A real social network, with users, followers, status updates,... and only one single thing to share: your current mood as a simple color and a few words: "I'm down", "I'm ok" or "I'm feeling super!"
Think
Although the actual data that is managed by this small piece of software, is nothing more that a single word - so in essence even less than the two numbers she had to add in class - the number things one has to think about before the software is useable, is litterally magnitudes higher. One of today's problems with education related to software development is that kids are thought how to program, not how to think about what to program.
Giants
Stand on their shoulders! Use all the wonderful tools out there to build your software with as little lines of code as possible. Every line can and will introduce a bug, so less code is better: follow conventions, don't try to reinvent the wheel, be generic, fail-fast and iterate. There is my top-5 advise to any novice sofware developer out there. Rather than the actual code, I want to focus on these aspects while coding.
Pet Store Project
The one hour scope soon exploded into experimenting with various things I hadn't taken the time for to play with. Even that aspect is a nice example of one of the problems in software develoment: feature creep ;-) I extended my typical development stack with new tools, took some time to look deeper into things I simply copy/pasted up to now and really upgraded my day to day toolbox with improved ready to reuse components.
