Construction

Overview

Construction is the discipline of assembling physical structures from raw materials, to specifications, under conditions that include weather, gravity, and people disagreeing about where a wall should go.^[1] It is among the oldest forms of building and remains, by some definitions, the canonical one — the one against which all other kinds of building are quietly measured.

On this wiki, construction is not a footnote. It is Burbridge's origin discipline and an ongoing practice. See also: Building Across Mediums.

The Work

Construction work is typically organized in stages, roughly:

1. Foundation — the ground the thing stands on. Do not skip this stage. It will not be forgiven.
2. Framing — the skeleton. Everything after depends on the skeleton being right.
3. Rough-in — the unglamorous phase where pipes, wires, and ducts go where they must, not where they'd like to.
4. Finish — the part the client sees, and therefore the part most likely to be judged incorrectly.
5. Completion — a philosophical category more than a practical one. See its own article.

Each stage has its own vocabulary, its own characteristic mistakes, and its own clientele of people who did not appreciate how much effort the last stage took.

Burbridge and Construction

Burbridge's career in construction predates any software work. Early employment included rough framing, finish carpentry, and enough time spent on the job site to develop a worldview that would later inform Aggressive Craftsmanship almost in its entirety.^[2]

Burbridge continues to build in the physical world. Projects span new construction, remodels, solar installation, and the occasional custom piece built because a store-bought version didn't meet specs. The work is ongoing. The work is always ongoing.

"People ask if I 'still' do construction. The framing of the question is the problem. I also still do software." — Burbridge, overheard on a job site

Tools and Materials

See Hand Tools and The Material for extended treatments. In brief: the right tool is the tool appropriate to the material; the right material is the material that will do the job in question and still be doing it a decade later. This is, not coincidentally, also the right way to think about selecting a library or a framework.^[3]

The Ethos

Construction has its own set of unwritten rules, most of which overlap substantially with Aggressive Craftsmanship's written ones. A partial list:

• Measure twice. Cut once. If the cut is wrong, the board lied to you.
• Level is an orientation, not a suggestion.
• The client's "small change" is rarely small.
• Weather is not an edge case. Weather is the center case.
• The last 10% is not 10% of the work.
• If it looks wrong, it is wrong. Trust the eye.
• Clean up as you go. Your future self is watching.

Parallels to Software

Burbridge has observed, in various venues, that software would benefit from more construction-site thinking — and that construction would benefit from more software thinking (though the latter is less frequently welcomed). A partial mapping of equivalences:

References