3 ms·

Make it work. Make it pretty. Make it fast.

2 points by erikstarck 17y ago

diN0bot 17y ago
> "My education is software engineering (I have a masters degree) and when I was fresh out of school (which I was 10 years ago) I used to spend a lot of time drawing class diagrams and object interaction flows and lots of other paper stuff that didn’t take me anywhere closer to a working program." i have a master's, too, and i can relate to the progression from wanting "well designed code" to wanting "products that work and look pretty." i don't see the goals as mutually exclusive. writing diagrams, and indeed doing all sorts of on-paper design work, is often necessary for either better programming or better teamwork. i've worked with people who can keep crazy data structures and algorithms in their head. that's cool. maybe i'm all modest and unhackerly, but i can clearly see limitations in my mental space. i love loading problems and solutions into my head, but the real problems and solutions are often bigger than my head (elegance and the desire for simplicity aside...they'are awesome, too). the point is that it's impossible to work with non-writers, unless the "collaboration" is entirely modular. sometimes you need to hire a person to write a library for you. seldom do you need to spend a day reading and poking crazy code in order to understand the datastructures for a small tweak. look, i love open source and i've gotten pretty damn good and groking code. it doesn't matter. pictures can still display relationships better than code. it's faster. diagrams as documentation rocks. just don't go overboard. do exactly as much as is useful. just like simplifying, right? for me, i'm a better programmer when i write things down. after a few months, i'm happy when i can go back to an old section of code and see immediately what's going on. it means my friction for getting started is close to 0. i write down object models for all my databases because seeing a bunch of boxes and arrows in a single glance is a lot faster than scrolling through code. i wrote my own python script for converting django models into omnigraffle diagrams, and vice versa. sometimes i need the diagrams before i even write code, as i'm figuring things out. sometimes i need the diagrams later, when i'm adding features. i also used http://www.websequencediagrams.com http://www.websequencediagrams.com for the first time a few weeks ago to quickly draft up the complex interactions between a firefox extension, server and Amazon's FPS. looking at that diagram i know i have the logic right. the code is almost boring to write once i have a diagram. writing the correct code faster is a big win for me. i think some folks are afraid to admit that because it seems "unhackerly" or "unbrilliant." forget about that. being smart means doing exactly what you need to do to get the job done right, whatever the constraints on right are.
- erikstarck 17y ago
  Thanks, good thoughts. Most of the coding I've done in the last 2-3 years have been in my own projects, and it certainly helps when you're your own customer. I've also done lots of typical web stuff and once you've coded 5-10 html/logic/SQL-projects you start seeing the similarities and it's easier to go straight to code. If there's anything I put any significant time into before coding that would be the data model. It's hard to change built in restrictions.

2 points by erikstarck 17y ago

> "My education is software engineering (I have a masters degree) and when I was fresh out of school (which I was 10 years ago) I used to spend a lot of time drawing class diagrams and object interaction flows and lots of other paper stuff that didn’t take me anywhere closer to a working program." i have a master's, too, and i can relate to the progression from wanting "well designed code" to wanting "products that work and look pretty." i don't see the goals as mutually exclusive. writing diagrams, and indeed doing all sorts of on-paper design work, is often necessary for either better programming or better teamwork. i've worked with people who can keep crazy data structures and algorithms in their head. that's cool. maybe i'm all modest and unhackerly, but i can clearly see limitations in my mental space. i love loading problems and solutions into my head, but the real problems and solutions are often bigger than my head (elegance and the desire for simplicity aside...they'are awesome, too). the point is that it's impossible to work with non-writers, unless the "collaboration" is entirely modular. sometimes you need to hire a person to write a library for you. seldom do you need to spend a day reading and poking crazy code in order to understand the datastructures for a small tweak. look, i love open source and i've gotten pretty damn good and groking code. it doesn't matter. pictures can still display relationships better than code. it's faster. diagrams as documentation rocks. just don't go overboard. do exactly as much as is useful. just like simplifying, right? for me, i'm a better programmer when i write things down. after a few months, i'm happy when i can go back to an old section of code and see immediately what's going on. it means my friction for getting started is close to 0. i write down object models for all my databases because seeing a bunch of boxes and arrows in a single glance is a lot faster than scrolling through code. i wrote my own python script for converting django models into omnigraffle diagrams, and vice versa. sometimes i need the diagrams before i even write code, as i'm figuring things out. sometimes i need the diagrams later, when i'm adding features. i also used http://www.websequencediagrams.com http://www.websequencediagrams.com for the first time a few weeks ago to quickly draft up the complex interactions between a firefox extension, server and Amazon's FPS. looking at that diagram i know i have the logic right. the code is almost boring to write once i have a diagram. writing the correct code faster is a big win for me. i think some folks are afraid to admit that because it seems "unhackerly" or "unbrilliant." forget about that. being smart means doing exactly what you need to do to get the job done right, whatever the constraints on right are.

erikstarck 17y ago
Thanks, good thoughts. Most of the coding I've done in the last 2-3 years have been in my own projects, and it certainly helps when you're your own customer. I've also done lots of typical web stuff and once you've coded 5-10 html/logic/SQL-projects you start seeing the similarities and it's easier to go straight to code. If there's anything I put any significant time into before coding that would be the data model. It's hard to change built in restrictions.