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At first, I though "Man, this sounds like a recipe for technical debt" but then I realized I'm guilty of exactly what you're talking about. In fact, I was brows
by alexwestholm 16y ago
At first, I though "Man, this sounds like a recipe for technical debt" but then I realized I'm guilty of exactly what you're talking about. In fact, I was browsing hacker news as a break from googling the best way to implement a feature that I could do in 10 minutes if I weren't concerned about having it perfect from the get-go.
I recently realized that I code slower than I used to. I assumed this was because I stopped hacking for a few years during law school, but now I think it has more to do with being immersed in a risk-averse perfectionist environment that leads to exactly the kind of timidity you're talking about. This may be one of the more valuable insights I've gotten from hacker news in a while. Thanks!
- Xurinos 16y agoBe careful. Sometimes the reason you code slower is that you are thinking from an architectural level and are making sure your code is a reasonable fit. Sometimes you are taking the time to shape the code in a way that is maintainable. I have felt this loss of what the author calls "programming innocence", but when I dig down deeply, I think it is more that I am doing MORE work than less. When I was young and stupid, I thought I was implementing features, and I whipped things out quickly. Lord do I remember also spending a lot of time debugging those things, and if I came back to the project a few months later, I would find it hard to read, figured I knew better, and would rewrite the whole thing with my newfangled enlightenment. Today, I spend a lot less time debugging and rewriting, and my projects are more feature-complete. It may feel like I am programming slower, but I am still whipping things out, and unlike my young days where I was my own customer, my requirements are constantly changing: I write code that can evolve.