The Quality Without A Name is a phrase coined by Christopher Alexander in The Timeless Way of Building to describe the feeling of satisfaction and contentment engendered by good building. He later went on to call it ’life’, but a friend of mine described it as ‘The Tao of Building’, which seems rather appropriate too. The Timeless Way of Building is a fantastic, if somewhat overwritten book, introducing Alexander’s themes and ideas about how modern architects and builders can recapture the qualities inherent in great (usually old) buildings.
Somewhat to my own surprise, I’m at YAPC::Europe in Paris. I pitched up to the early birds session and offered a talk if they’d had any people pull out and it turned out that they had – Ronan Oger was due to give a half day tutorial on SVG-based GUIs on the first afternoon of the conference, but he wasn’t going to make it in time, so the organizers swapped his talk with Dave Cross’s talk on Tieing and Overloading Objects in Perl.
Bah! The only trouble with being in full control of a website is that you’ve got nobody to blame when you screw up.
I was talking to Gavin Estey on iChat about the problems inherent in interviewing a new programmer. The cost of screwing up can be enormous. How do you find out whether the candidate is for real? How do you do it quickly?
A good time was had by all
