Introduction
What could the “performing flea of English literature”, who wrote before CP/M was even a gleam in an engineer’s eye, teach us about building software?
One day on LinkedIn Michael Blakeney asked if “there are things about modern software engineering that could be learned from old literature”. This sure caught my attention! Three or four names immediately came to mind.
You might be surprised to learn that the novels of P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) made my list, and I think we can learn a lot from his work.
TL;DR: P.G Wodehouse was a British novelist best known for his Jeeves and Wooster stories. You do remember that “Ask Jeeves” thing, don’t you? It’s based on a character from one of his novels.
The Wodehousian Slant: Look At Things Sideways
Wodehouse had a way of looking at things sideways, upside down, and inside out. Or as Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) once put it “looking at life through the wrong end of the telescope”.
There are so many “mental traps” in our discipline, such as confirmation bias and other anti-patterns of thought. So often when designing or debugging, we need an outlook that readily challenges assumptions and finds elegant alternatives.
I dislike that word ‘try.’ It suggests a lack of confidence in my powers.
(Galahad at Blandings)
However, these “mental traps” have so much “wind in their sails” in our mind that we need a strong countervailing force. This is where the “Wodehousian Slant” comes in. Far more than a mere “humour device”, I believe it is a way of looking at things that is deeply useful in software engineering.
It’s basically an outworking of a spirit of curiosity (a great virtue in software engineering!) and a spirit of playfulness.
Another key component of this “sideways glance” is also the ability to not take ourselves too seriously, we need to sometimes be able to belly-laugh at ourselves.
Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.
(Right Ho, Jeeves)
Fit The Mold: Everyone Has Their Shtick, And That’s Ok
Though I am head-over-heels a fan of Wodehouse’s novels, I can somewhat relate to one line of critique. One could suppose that Wodehouse’s prose is basically just a thin veneer of syntactical sugar pasted over formulaic fluff in the form of an incredibly thin and predictable plot.
This hypothetical critic isn’t entirely wrong. However, they are missing the point. Wodehouse had his shtick, and the lack of plot depth is precisely the point. It allows Wodehouse to innovate. His “thin, cookie-cutter plot” was precisely the sort of stable and predictable springboard he needed to launch off and crush it with his intense wordsmithing.
Everyone has their shtick. Figure out the strong, steady, predictable base you need in order to launch your improvisation, creativity, and build unpredictable things.
When looking at teams and systems, we need to figure out which parts are standing and which parts are moving, what’s the launch pad and what’s the rocket.
Just as Wodehouse found freedom within his narrative structure, you may find that tried-and-true (boring?) frameworks, patterns, or methodologies are really stable foundations and free us to innovate in other areas–because we aren’t wrestling with the more foundational problems that have been already solved.
Break The Mold: Stretch Things
While Wodehouse had his shtick, and he stuck pretty close to his plot formula, he was unafraid to stretch conventions and break rules.
I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.”
(The Code of the Woosters)
I have not kept a list, but I am certain P.G. Wodehouse broke a lot of rules of language and “proper novel writing”.
P.G. Wodehouse may be the ultimate wordsmith. What is “wordsmithing”? It is nothing but the expressive, elegant, precise, styled usage of words.
Though his plots may be as thin as pancakes during a batter shortage, there is no contesting that he is a masterful wordsmith. To Wodehouse, words were malleable things. He split them, joined them, created them, bounced them around, and, of course, turned them sideways and upside down.
This is of course an outworking of the spirit of playfulness and an important aspect of being an innovator. Perhaps we need a little more of what you might call codesmithing. Yes, even in this age of code generation, there is a great deal of value in expressive, elegant code which both fits the mold (conventional) and breaks the mold (innovative).
Conclusion
So as you attend that design review meeting or mull over the right prompt to get Claude or Cursor to do what you want, you may do well to bring a bit of Wodehouse into your game.
Look at things sideways. Embrace your shtick, but then push the boundaries. And always remember, you are a codesmith, so act like one. Your craft deserves the same elegance and mastery that Wodehouse brought to his novels. He was a wordsmith. We are codesmiths, always codesmiths.