My favorite webcomic is Phil and Kaja Foglio's Girl Genius ("Adventure, Romance, Mad Science!"), which is a lovely gas-lamp themed melange of nuanced good and evil, love and loyalty, courage and destiny, and occasional bouts of pure silliness. Near-fatal doses of silliness. (If you click through to the link, it's even sillier than normal, being on holiday from the main storyline's arc.) The underlying premise of this steampunker's dream is that innovation is driven by "sparks," who are people with the ability to invent and--under duress--build nearly anything out of nearly anything.
I didn't realize it until tonight, but we're living among sparks here in the Coulee Region. The owner of the place where the La Crosse Programming Users Group meeting are currently held is one of them--the "poster child," as he joked tonight. (In case there is any ambiguity, yes, that is, indeed, a shameless plug for the LCPUG.) A big part of what makes Brian so amazing is how matter-of-fact, Point-A-to-Point-B his "sparkiness" is.
That's something I could definitely use more of in my day-to-day work. When you're the kind of programmer who deals directly with users, you sometimes start to get a bit paranoid, looking 'round corners. You try not to paint yourself into corners with overly-simplistic design assumptions. But sometimes it seems like the more blades and corkscrews and toothpicks and can-openers you put into the (software) Swiss Army Knife you're building, the more likely it is that someone--be it customer or management--will come along and say, "That's nice, but it doesn't have a cappuccino-maker. That's gonna be a deal-breaker, you know."
Now, I won't go whole-hog and declare myself a fan of Agile Programming. Why? Because I've had the joy of making that kind of code scale. As in: "Don't complicate things--we need to get this code into production. That'll never be anything other than a 1:1 relationship." Riiiiight. That being said, I strongly suspect that I am, via sheer cynicism, drifting too far toward the other end of the spectrum. And so I'm glad that my world is blessed with the species of spark who just gets stuck in without a lot of fuss and fanfare, and just *creates*.
