Metamodernism for Software Developers
Tags: discuss, design
Published: 2019-05-01 13:52:10

---
title: Metamodernism for Software Developers
published: true
description:  
tags: #discuss #design
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/49jyu2o2r5rv051zse9w.jpg
---

> The present is a symptom of the twin birth of immediacy and obsolescence. Today, we are nostalgists as much as we are futurists. The new technology enables the simultaneous experience and enactment of events from a multiplicity of positions.
> -Luke Turner, _Metamodernist Manifesto_


This isn’t an introduction to [Metamodernism](http://www.metamodernism.com/2015/01/12/metamodernism-a-brief-introduction/), and this isn’t [a manifesto](http://www.metamodernism.org/). It is a deep dive into the ideas seeded in both. It’s an asking of a question: “What does metamodernist software feel like?”

Metamodernsim is interested in the sincere and the romantic in opposition to the “deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives” of post-modernism. It is fundamentally obsessed with oscillation between states: that is to say it is dialectal. Metamodernism says there is sincere meaning to be found, and the answer comes from the oscillation between positions. 

As Luke Turner proscribes, “We must go forth and oscillate!”

###Oscillations:

* __Between software and reality:__ Find substance in the world outside of the digital. Ground the work we do in the dirty world you inhabit. Use paper, and assume your users use paper. Write code that imagines people at desks, people who spill drinks. 

* __Between microservices and monoliths:__ Microservices are agnostic and independent. They wait for something to touch them and react. Monoliths are mystically large and create space for the explicitly intentional and the deeply complex. _Oscillate between agnosticism and mysticism._

* __Between convention and configuration:__ Vibrate between the hardness of configuration and softness of convention. There is room there to create something that is at once sharply defined and forgiving.

* __Between using and building:__ Use the software you write, to know it completely. If you can’t do that, talk frankly and lightly with the people who do use it.

* __Between practical and beautiful:__ Tuner writes: “Just as science strives for poetic elegance, artists might assume a quest for truth”

* __Between mobile and static:__ Do you want people thinking about your software everywhere? Anywhere? All the time? What happens when you let people take a break? 

* __Between dense and minimal:__ Show people what they need to see to do the jobs they want to do.

* __Between self-serving and ethical:__ Jobs need to be done. Some jobs hurt people. Wiggle in the space between those facts. 

* __Between public and private:__ Share, mindfully, and not on other's behalf.

* __Between agility and intentionality:__ There is a good and useable space between progress and purpose. We need to make sure things are moving forward, keeping pace with our ever changing environment, but growth for the sake of growth is the attitude of a cancer cell.


_Cover Image:_ Odd Nerdrum, _You See We Are Blind_