Okay, so how do I get started?

Taking the first step is really what Organic is all about -- most people are wary of jumping on board with a new framework, or a specific style of coding, or even a new language at this point if what they are using truly meets their needs. It seems like every time we turn around a new framework is gaining popularity, threatening to unseat the current king of the mountain due to a faster or more efficient way of getting the job done.

However, talk to some programmers who have been around for twenty or thirty years, who have been through the evolutions, and who have been through the revolutions, and who understand that while design patterns and object oriented programming are the buzzwords of today, they are rooted in best practices that were established decades ago by people who had virtual toolboxes a tenth of the size of what the average programmer has at their disposal in this day and age.

And that's part of the problem. The programmer of today has too many options, too many tools, and while having options isn't necessarily the problem, having a lack of wisdom in choosing the correct hammer for the job when presented with five is usually the issue.

If I were a gardener, it would be like going into my shed to get a trowel, and instead of reaching for that old rusty trowel that I know gets the job done, I would have eight trowels, some new, shiny, and never used, to choose from. Which one is the best to use for this particular job? And what if it was a special sort of tool that INCLUDED a trowel? A sort of "integrated gardening environment", or IGE (tm) that attempted to not only solve my trowel-ing problem, but also my raking, and my pruning ones like some sort of huge Swiss Army knife? At most I'd probably end up with a tool that is able to handle these responsibilities in a mediocre manner. At worst, well, how many utilities have YOU tried playing around with for a couple days only to come to the determination that it's a worthless piece of junk? But, I digress...

Back to taking the first step: It's important to understand that Organic application development isn't a framework, and it's not a language. It's a methodical approach to writing software for your organization which is three things: straightforward, future-conscientious, and quick to release.

Taking the first step toward growing an Organic model really means that you have to do nothing more than accept the fact that you don't need frameworks, you don't need crazy utilities, you don't need special languages, you don't need any of it to create something amazing for your organization What you need is your brain -- a whole lot of your brain -- so dump the useless programming junk that is slowing you down and make some room for a new way of thinking that will turn you into a programming warrior...er, gardener...

This garden is growing...slowly

Haven't been posting as much as I want to -- spent a lot of time this year thinking about Organic, though, and how it really seems like the M-Theory of programming to me. It's such a cool concept, and it just amazes me that everyone I talk to seems to be SO close to making the jump, yet there's always something that people just can't seem to grasp. If I could just figure out the missing link, I could explain it all so easily. I guess it will come out as I post more of my thoughts.

Speaking of thoughts, here's a good one: What gets me about Organic is that it's based so much on actual organizational structure, which is why the term "software modeling" makes so much sense in this regard. I think about concepts like SOA, BPM, and structural cybernetics (see NDMA, Inc. for more info on that), and how Organic ties these ideas and more together in a meaningful amalgamation of thoughts, rules, and information.

It amazes me...

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