Painting the Hammer
Posted: December 1st, 2008 | Author: jonathan | Filed under: curmudgeon, philosophy, rambling |
Remember this.
Languages, frameworks, design patterns, blogs, Photoshop, Fireworks, off-the-shelf products, roll-your-own solutions, operating systems, servers, desktop PCs, laptops, phones, shoes, socks, paradigms: they’re all just tools.
Craftsmen create. They use their tools and they get the job done.
The end result is the job. The tools are irrelevant to the craftsmen. Don’t debate others’ choices of tools - learn from them. That is the path of the artisan.
The more tools you have, the better. The more you use them all, the better.
Anything else is just spending your apprenticeship looking for the perfect hammer, then spending your career painting it.
spot on. as I’ve said on my blog before a job should always be about the skills and not the tools.
i get really annoyed when people insist/assume you must use photoshop/dreamweaver for design and development (read any web job advert) when i feel i can get the same quality of work out of
open source alternatives such as gimp, inkscape and notepad++.
a shared set of tools are, of course, useful when it comes to collaborating but then that is more a reflection of the commercialisation of proprietry tools and depending certain parts of our industry on them than it is about their genuine need.
Wise, wise words