1. Introduction

This is Yellow: Principles (or useless aphorisms) for software dev.

Laying out “the rules” or “how it should be” has been a popular pastime among intellectuals and posers alike through the ages.

These sorts of projects that aim to pull together pithy ideas and single sentence quotes explaining how the truths of how we work, and if you just do this one thing everything will be fantastic.

They are mostly useless, but I’m hoping that this will be at least somewhat useful.

If it doesn’t teach you something new then I hope that it supports the correct ideas that you have about the world.

Those ideas obviously being correct because, you know, if you agree with me then you have to be right, right?

This is an experiment on my part.

I’m trying something new to see if this is helpful to people. This ebook began as transcripts of a series of videos.

The videos themselves are probably useful to some. Text can sometimes be like a wall that separates you from the meaning that you’re trying to find in it. Sometimes having a voice, something human that plays in your ear, can be helpful to sort of emotionally ground the ideas and sort of guide you through them.

But narration is also a classic tool for writing. A way to cut through blocks and hesitation.

The idea for the videos was inspired by Derek Jarman’s Blue, although my motivation is obviously not as dire and depressing as his, as he made his movie entirely a blue screen with incredibly well-constructed audio track because he was turning blind from AIDS.

It was a way for him to finish the tasks that he felt the world had set to him.

This is the same, just less horrible. It’s a way for me to see if I can get the ideas I have out there with different kinds of work, using methods I can use at different times when I don’t have the focus to write, when I don’t have the focus to construct a more intricately structured text or a book and can instead bring you something through different means to make sure that my time is used more productively.

So yeah, I definitely stole the idea from a dying man.

I don’t feel guilty about it because I’m hoping that you’re going to go and watch his movie as a result.

It’s available on YouTube, amazingly enough, in stereo.

It has to be in stereo.

It’s a great film.

Go watch it. Then come back. If you feel like it.