Situated Software

A reference to this article by Clay Shirky was posted to a Patterns mailing list I belong to. I found the new perspective on software engineering so fascinating that I thought others would be interested as well.

Mr. Shirky describes his experiences while teaching at NYU and the approaches his students took when creating software for very specific, well-known social groups. He's basically talking about the opposite end of the spectrum from highly general, scalable, enterprise web applications.

I found his observations about how the situation in which the software is to be developed and deployed to be most enlightening. Should we learn to think outside the JVM?