Sand mandala‘s are drawings made of sand by tibetan monks. Their full significance may be lost to me, as i’m not a buddhist, but one aspect is clear: a layer of unfixed grains of sand is not made to last.

And that is their point – nothing lasts, everything is transitory.

Often, that’s how being a developer feels like: drawing with sand. However beautiful the patterns we implement, however elegant and succinct our code, we just know that its life expectancy is about 10 years at best (some kernel code excepted).

A better framework, a new paradigm or more simply a newer version is going to come along, and our lovingly crafted software is going to be dumped faster than you can say ‘rm -rf *’.

(Not that it’s any different for other human endeavours. As technology, fashions, consumerism move more and more quickly, obsoletion is fairly instantaneous)

So maybe that’s the spirit in which it should be done. A mandala. A thing of beauty, here today, gone tomorrow.