The Material

Overview

The Material is the stuff from which a thing is built. In construction this includes lumber, concrete, drywall, and fasteners. In software this includes languages, frameworks, libraries, and the data that flows through them. In both cases, respect for the material is the precondition for building well.

Properties Matter

Every material has properties you cannot argue with. Wood moves with humidity; concrete cures on its own timeline; steel rusts if you stop paying attention. JavaScript is single-threaded; SQL transactions have isolation levels; network calls can fail. You can plan for these properties, or you can be surprised by them. The material does not care which.^[1]

Choosing the Material

• Use the right material for the load. Pressure-treated where it needs to be; plain Douglas fir where it doesn't. The same applies to frameworks.
• Budget is a factor, not a directive. Cheaper materials often cost more in labor.
• Availability matters. The perfect material you cannot get is worse than the good material you can.
• Maintenance is part of the choice. Cedar shakes look beautiful and need replacing. Someone has to replace them. Sometimes that someone is the version of you in five years.

Respect

The most consistent quality of skilled builders — across mediums — is that they treat the material as an agent in the work, not a passive recipient of it. Burbridge has been observed to reject a stack of lumber on delivery not because it was unusable, but because "it knows it's better than that." The reaction in the software equivalent is called a "rewrite."

"You don't bend the material to the plan. You adjust the plan to the material." — Burbridge, to a frustrated apprentice

References