As we race toward the impending Siggraph conference deadline, I am in the middle of coding a demo/presentation. And it occurs to me, watching this process, that there are three distinct parts to any such endeavor.
One is the coding itself. You need to make the thing you are going to show, or there is nothing to talk about.
Another is good documentation. Your little software child will not live on if you don’t provide proper instructions for using it, explain how it works, and make sure to give people a way in.
The third is performance. You need to try it yourself lots of times, show it to other people, get their feedback, listen carefully to their feedback, and iterate like heck.
So “creating software” isn’t just a matter of creating software. It’s a matter of telling a good story and telling it right, listening carefully to how your audience receives that story, and then constantly going back in to make it better.
In that way, I guess it’s like a lot of other things.