Learning from Permaculture: Sustainable Software Development
summary
Argues that permaculture rules map to software: observe before acting, map domains like topography, and design from patterns down. Describes tools and outcomes: Rails view work, a Ruby gem and a bower package that services ~30 internal apps, scaling orgs from ~20 to ~150 engineers. Recommends concrete techniques: strangler fig refactor for incremental rewrites, tend edges (APIs, ActiveRecord, Sidekiq), and treat AI as pioneer species—fast, replaceable code that exposes weak perennials.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Permaculture and software
- 6:32Permaculture ethics
- 10:20Observe codebases
- 14:49Integrate development
- 20:05Patterns to details
- 25:18Zones in software
- 29:07Small slow solutions
- 31:55Edges in systems
- 35:03AI in development
- 37:49Tending codebase
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