Wabi-Sabi

As soon as I saw wikis I liked the idea. Some of the early people involved in wikis at the Portland Patterns Repository talked about the concept of wabi-sabi.

As Wikipedia will tell you, wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic. It deals with seeing the beauty in what is not perfect or complete. It's a reprieve from the sterile, sacharin world we have created. The most typical example in wabi-sabi is a bowl, you can see it's worn edges from use, you can see the finger marks that the craftsman made when creating it, there are no sharp edges. This is juxtaposed with a white box, with clean sharp edges, no sign of its use, imperfection or creation.

As it relates to wikis I think they were trying to say that don't worry about making your wiki page 100% correct. Leave place-holders for more information to be filled out later. It's not something you work on once, it's something you gradually add to and it's never perfect so don't try to find beauty in perfection.

I think wabi-sabi is important to developers because we are too often looking for absolute correctness. It's a step to maturing as a software engineer. Understanding what is good enough and what's good enough for now. Many times we wait months analyzing and perfecting to a point where our solution becomes irrelevant and in the end it's still not perfect.

I read a book on wabi-sabi, I recommend it. I can't say that it's the book that has done the most to make me a good developer but I think it has helped.