When Blogs Work Best
I love this. BoingBoing lead me to an article about JoelOnSoftware's new bionic office. This was a great article about how Joel had designed his companies new office space to be both sexy and functional for programmers. His list of requirements was quite good:
- Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation.
Programmers need lots of power outlets. They should be able to plug new gizmos in at desk height without crawling on the floor. We need to be able to rewire any data lines (phone, LAN, cable TV, alarms, etc.) easily without opening any walls, ever. It should be possible to do pair programming. When you're working with a monitor all day, you need to rest your eyes by looking at something far away, so monitors should not be up against walls. The office should be a hang out: a pleasant place to spend time. If you're meeting your friends for dinner after work you should want to meet at the office. As Philip Greenspun bluntly puts it: "Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer's home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office."
One of the clever things that his architect did was design all of the offices so that they have light on two sides of the room. This lead me to the Pattern Language page which in turn lead me to discover "A Timeless Way of Building", "A Pattern Language" and "The Oregon Experiment" all by ChristopherAlexander.
All of which makes me think that I should have stuck with my childhood dream of becomming an architect and makes me dream of building actual physical things again instead of building invisible links between binary objects.
Which reminds me, it's time to buy a house.
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