In preparation for my new role at VMW last year, I started to brush up on my application and development skills: I played with some little toy programs in Java and Scala and engaged with some design artifacts (yes, those amazing UML colored diagrams to reasons over problems!). I took time to write a few notes down along the way and left a few points to ponder. With some spare hours in recent weeks, I have dug up those shaky notes and tried to mold them into a more consumable piece of information. My intention is not to delve into technicalities or technological debates. I am simply walking in the shoes of thousands of customers and organizations I have come across in my career, inviting to look beneath the surface of our pop IT culture (to paraphrase Alan Kay) and aiming to give a more nuanced view on what building software is about. The good news is that I am not inventing much or speculating over – I am going to be much more descriptive than normative so to speak. In a way I am like...