I was recently interviewed for an SD Times article about the role of art and science in software development.
Chris Gunther, cofounder and developer at Room 118 Solutions, agreed with Jacobson.
“I believe software development is not an art, but rather a craft as it is ultimately defined by its ability to solve a need for an end user,” he said. “Beautifully written code doesn’t count for much when it fails to solve the needs of the end user, and vice versa; poorly written code will have little negative effect on the end user when it successfully solves their needs.
“I think the craft side of software development becomes more of a necessity when working alongside other developers. Code that clearly reflects the domain model and is well organized becomes self-documenting and allows fellow developers to collaborate and understand the domain much easier.”
Gunther believed that science plays a role in development, but mainly due to the experiments used to find the perfect combination of code and the fact that developers are always building on top of older theories and ideas.
This is the second half of my series on the services we use here at Room 118 to operate efficiently and entirely in the cloud. If you missed 
So, I ran into a peculiar problem while trying to get my homebuilt 4TB NAS up and running last night. I bought two 2TB SATA drives, and sourced everything else from my old computer boneyard (i.e. my closet). The issue I was having was the Ubuntu 10.10 Server installer kept failing when trying to install GRUB. I eventually tracked this down to an issue installing GRUB to GPT partitions (GRUB 
When Chris and I formed Room 118 Solutions one year ago, we didn’t really know how we were going to run a business from our home offices. We didn’t even know what was involved in running a corporation (an S-corp, to be exact), from a business perspective. Over this past year, we’ve fallen into a nice groove using a combination of web applications that has made everything from collaboration to running payroll a breeze. We’d like to share them with you, as they mostly apply to all small business teams. In Part I, I’ll cover services we use to work with customers; in Part II, I’ll cover services we use internally.