{"id":2592,"date":"2017-12-31T14:03:02","date_gmt":"2017-12-31T20:03:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=2592"},"modified":"2021-11-21T13:00:43","modified_gmt":"2021-11-21T19:00:43","slug":"knowledge-in-software-development-whats-your-wood-lot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2592","title":{"rendered":"Knowledge in software development: what’s your wood lot?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gene Logsdon, who passed away in 2016<\/a>, was a farmer and a wise man.\u00a0 In a recent repost (originally written in 2008), he discusses why wood is more valuable than gold<\/a>.\u00a0 From the post:<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t eat gold like you can the bounty of trees in fruits, nuts, maple syrup, and various edible mushrooms and herbal treasures of the woodland. You can\u2019t warm yourself with gold. You can\u2019t bask in the shade of gold. You can\u2019t make fence posts out of gold. A gold house would be mighty expensive. You can\u2019t make a windbreak out of gold. You can\u2019t make furniture, violins, guitars, wall paneling, picture frames, gun stocks, tomato stakes, flooring, barns, chicken coops, and hog houses out of gold. You can\u2019t mulch a garden with gold leaf. Gold does not take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen to preserve an environment we can live in. Gold does not provide habitat for millions of wild animals and zillions of insects necessary for a sustainable environment. And in fact, you can make methane out of wood much more efficiently than ethanol out of corn. All gold can do is go up and down in price and invariably it turns out to be a poor investment, as many panic buyers learn the hard way.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This resonated with me.\u00a0 Of course when things go awry, as they did in 2008 and 2001 (in the USA), having a pile of cash feels good.\u00a0 But money is not wealth (this article covers that<\/a>, as well as some other key points about capitalism).\u00a0 Money can come and go, but wealth, whether knowledge, relationships or wood lots, remains with you.\u00a0 Some forms of wealth require more care and feeding than others, but they all have the attribute of providing value in the real world.<\/p>\n

When you are in software development, knowledge is a common form of wealth.\u00a0 I always tell teams I lead that almost every problem we’re facing is a new one, because if it wasn’t new, it most likely would have been automated or turned into a service or library that we could use.\u00a0 So there are plenty of chances to gain new knowledge.<\/p>\n

There are a few categories of software development knowledge.<\/p>\n