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I'm currently on a sort of sabbatical from greenfield research projects. I'm doing maintenance programming on a large widely used open source project. It's been
by jebarker 3y ago
I'm currently on a sort of sabbatical from greenfield research projects. I'm doing maintenance programming on a large widely used open source project. It's been really refreshing. I didn't realize how much I was feeling the pressures of 15+ years of greenfield research. By contrast the maintenance programming is clearly defined, easier to put down at the end of the day and unambiguously useful. I'm also rapidly improving in my debugging, code understanding, profiling and optimizing skills which will make me a better programmer when I do return to writing new code.
- aidos 3y agoI’ve described this to other programmers before. Greenfield projects are fatiguing because you still have options—too many options. Every layer is still open for you to rethink and rework. Let the hand wringing commence! As the months and years wear on though, things change. Each bug has an obvious solution, and you’ll take the path of least disruption. Implementing new features is a matter of figuring out which trade offs you’re most ok with. Maybe you need to refactor something first, but that’s an obvious path itself. You’re painted in a corner. A beautiful corner where the only safe thing to do is to tread carefully. But you don’t mind, because you know where you are and what you need to do to get to where you want to go.
- jebarker 3y agoNicely put. I'd also add that for me being a researcher became my identity and so my self-worth became tied to the perception and adoption of the research. With an established project (especially one I didn't write) there's already a stable acceptance of it's value and so I'm free to just maintain and improve it.