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Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development

• aspirin 11y ago
  Organization is the hardest part for me personally in getting better as a developer. How to build a structure that is easy to change and extend. Any tips where to find good books or online sources?
  • vollmond 11y ago
    Check out Clean Code by Robert C. Martin. May be helpful.
  • chiachun 11y ago
    Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. This famous book emphasized controlling complexity and how to build a structure that is easy to extend.
    • uxcn 11y ago
      The cost of complexity is exponential -Rob Pike
  • Toine 11y ago
    Same here. I only have 2 years of experience, but right now my opinion is that this is not something you learn in a book (for the moment). You can learn how to create clean, readable methods and classes with a book (1). You can learn how to refactor old methods and classes with a book (2). You can learn how to organize a small team to allow fast iterations with many books. But building a project lasting more than a few months with constant changes in the requirements, new developers every month, new SDKs and frameworks every 3 days, without the code rotting to death and everything going out of control is a different story, at least for me. I guess you just learn by watching old guys do what they do after decades of experience...unless someone has a magic book for me? (1) http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship-ebook/dp/B001GSTOAM http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsman... (2) http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Existing-Addison-Wesley-Technology-ebook/dp/B007WTFWJ6 http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Existing-Addison...
    • Glide 11y ago
      My personal experience is that I had to maintain a set of applications I wrote for a company. The same application had to be used repeatedly (3-5 times) a year because it supported a specific business processes. It was mundane work, but did it teach me how to organize because it made the pain of disorganized code very real. That one hack comes back to haunt you several times a year. I was lucky that this was one of the first things I had learned as a developer out of school. It was a little different because the projects were small enough to be solo, but it was humbling because all of the mistakes were my own.
    • sterlingw 11y ago
      I just finished a book called "Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby." It teaches you how to build OO applications that are pleasant to maintain. I highly recommend it. http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Object-Oriented-Design-Ruby-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321721330/ http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Object-Oriented-Design-Ruby-...
  • DanielStraight 11y ago
    The classic essay Big Ball of Mud is relevant as well: http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html
  • minthd 11y ago
    >> How to build a structure that is easy to change and extend. This is a very good book on subject, very clear: http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Object-Oriented-Design-Ruby-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321721330 http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Object-Oriented-Design-Ruby-...
• anton_gogolev 11y ago
  This can be reduced to: Do Not Program Yourself into a Corner
  • deleted 11y ago
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• deleted 11y ago
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• blazespin 11y ago
  Design patterns by the Gang of Four was great for this.
  • ebiester 11y ago
    No. This is an orthogonal concern. This is the equivalent of knowing to use each pattern.
    • qznc 11y ago
      The promise of Design Patterns (tm) is that you can systematically learn to organize your code. The article argues that only experience does.
      • jeremiep 11y ago
        But design patterns are horrible at organizing code. They have a much higher chance of introducing unneeded complexity. It should be no surprise that almost every single design pattern can be replaced with a simple lambda in languages supporting them.
        • TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
          Design patterns are excellent at creating the illusion of organisation. I recently had to modify someone else's Mac app. On the surface it looked like a textbook example of successful use of design patterns. Everything was highly modular, functions were simple, there was clear separation of concerns, controllers and views were distinct, and so on. Problem was, the key features were still baked in and hard to modify. So while it looked modular, it wasn't - the affordances were fixed and there was no way to generalise them without pulling apart at least a couple of levels. IMO it's not abstract organisation that matters. Organisation is only good if it makes it easier to achieve clearly-defined goals and benefits. You need to know what the goals are, and make some guesses about what they might be in the future. Otherwise you're just putting stuff in layers and boxes and drawing arrows everywhere for no good reason.
• sgt101 11y ago
  Which is why jupyter/ipython is so great -> you can do some fantastic documentation of code with working examples and visualisation, you can do it while you write it !
• msandford 11y ago
  This is incredibly true. I once turned 60kLoC of classic ASP in VBScript into about 20kLoC of python/django including templates. And added a bunch of features that would have been impossible on the old code-base. It turned the job from hellish (features were impossible to add) to very nearly boring (there wasn't much to do anymore). So with this newfound freedom I built some machines to automate the data entry and once that got rolling the job got even more boring. Because it was a small company with a very long learning curve the owner didn't let people go, but instead kept them on so that he didn't have to hire and train new people as growth accelerated. But with all the automation some slack found its way into the system and problems that had normally required me to stop working on my normal job and help put out fires now got handled by people who weren't stretched a little too thin. Sadly there's (seemingly) no way to interview people for this ability so we're stuck with the standard "write some algorithm on a whiteboard" type problems that are in no way indicative of real world capabilities.
  • jfoutz 11y ago
    "Tell me about writing a compiler" There's no way to interview for what you're looking for, but compilers seem to require both great organizational skills and some algorithmic chops. there's enough complexity you can't hide lack of one side or the other. Anyway, asking about building and enhancing a compiler seems like one of the ways to get insight about how people grow code. Every program is a seed. Is this the kind of guy that will end up with a mighty oak tree, or kudzu in 10 years?
    • pavlov 11y ago
      In typical software today, much of the complexity arises from interactivity. There are user actions, network events and all sorts of contingencies that make the program flow non-deterministic. A compiler doesn't have that. It's blissfully old-fashioned, really: read files in, write files out -- no interruptions or real-time requirements. You could do compilers on punch cards. In a way, the compiler is the most complex piece of software that you could imagine in 1960... But software has moved on and faces a different kind of complexity. Hence I'm not sure if asking about compiler architecture is really representative of the organizational skills needed by today's software engineering.
• matt_s 11y ago
  There is just a nice magical moment though when you grok what an application does and how it is organized, especially when you didn't write it, which is likely the most often case. I think a large issue is when an application has new people working on it or entirely new teams that maintain it. That is when the original authors methodology and organization of the application falls to the immediate need of the day. The functionality of the software should speak for itself. Commenting your code with why you are doing something is important to help other maintainers later on, including yourself, understand what you were thinking when it was written.
  • donatj 11y ago
    This. Organization is in the eye of the beholder. I've seen my code bases taken over and completely reversed, and frankly I have done the same. If only there was a better way to communicate exactly what you were trying to do.
    • matt_s 11y ago
      I don't know if this is solvable, it could just be human nature. Some folks like the analogy of software and building construction. I like the comparison to cooking... in this case the closest thing would be how a chef sets up their work space and how it is organized for what they are cooking. Some like it one way, some like it another - is one way better or worse?
• dsr_ 11y ago
  The most important skill in operations: systematic debugging. If the developers did well at organizing, this is much easier. The most important skill in low-level technical support: diplomacy. The most important skill in high-level technical support: figuring out what people are actually complaining about. Note that many low-level technical support problems look like high-level problems, and vice versa.
  • donatj 11y ago
    I find diplomacy a highly important skill as a developer as well. Strangely I feel I've become worse at it as the years go on.
    • mattmanser 11y ago
      One of the problems I hit was that I would get really grumpy when particular things were asked for. Once I learnt to think about why I was getting grumpy, and vocalize the actual problem it was easier. e.g. A client said to me recently could clicking the blog link open a new window? When I started programming I'd have said "Yes! I can do that!". Then after a few years I'd have got grumpy about it and said something passive aggressive "I guess so. That's not normal though...". Now I think about it, realized I hate it when links on the web behave unexpectedly and that's what's making me grumpy. Then explain to the client that that's you shouldn't take control of other people's browsers on public websites, and the better way is to have a clear link to get back to the shop on the blog.
      • loopbit 11y ago
        Related to what you are saying, I read somewhere, many years ago, that the best thing to do in cases where you feel like being grumpy or dismissing something that was asked for was to, instead, ask 'why'. The reasoning is that sometimes what the client is asking is his best guess as meeting a need he has. By asking why, chances are you'll get to the actual need and, oftentimes, find a better solution where both the client and you are happy. Over the years as a grumpy developer, this piece of advice has served me wonderfully well.
      • 11y ago
• stinos 11y ago
  Not only is it the most important skill (unless for small home projects maybe), it's also the one which takes the longest to learn and hence the one you really improve on during the years and which distinguishes the experienced ones from the lesser experienced ones. Coincidently, it's also the skill for which you won't find a ready-made answer on stackoverflow or any other site/book. thinking of it, I've also seen this as a typical difference between fresh CS graduates and those who have been programming for 10+ years. The latter would sometime take way longer to come up with clever math-oriented algorythms than the first, because the graduate has been trained for it and still has it fresh in memory, but experienced programmer would make up for that by being able to use the algorithms in all proper 'best practice' ways one can think of. Whereas the graduate would just slam it in somewhere and call it a day even though there are now x more dependencies and whatnot, you get the picture.
  • collyw 11y ago
    This is pretty much how I feel just now (after 12 years). I know Django pretty well after 4 years, and know where and how to add things to avoid breaking other parts of the code and make it work consistently with other parts. Yet nearly every job I apply for these days wants a 90 minute online test. (I just had to implement a sorting algorithm in psuedo code - I have never in 12 years had to implement a sorting algorithm as I choose an appropriate library to do that for me).
    • bluedino 11y ago
      >> Yet nearly every job I apply for these days wants a 90 minute online test. (I just had to implement a sorting algorithm in psuedo code - I have never in 12 years had to implement a sorting algorithm as I choose an appropriate library to do that for me). True, but if you can't implement a simple sorting algorithm how are you going to implement _____ ?
      • oldmanjay 11y ago
        Since the process of implementing _____ is almost certainly completely orthogonal to regurgitating a memorized algorithm one would never directly write themselves (to a fantastically close approximation of never) I'm not sure how that question has any validity at all.
• jaequery 11y ago
  Nice post, organization definitely is one of the most overlooked aspects of programming. It takes a lot of experience and thinking to be able to organize properly. It's really what separates the beginner programmers and the experienced ones.
  • jaequery 11y ago
    I think what it boils down to is coding from top down, rather than bottom up. As the OP points out, you need to see the entire landscape.
• brightball 11y ago
  Great read. 100% agree.
• justonepost 11y ago
  Arguably, this is what higher level languages like Java and C++ provide. Tight organizational language metaphors that help implement design patterns in a thoughtful, consistently structured manner.
  • crusso 11y ago
    That's kind of like saying that McDonalds provides a healthy meal because they have salads on the menu. The truth is that most people still eat the burgers and fries. Although higher level languages provide some features for organization, you still must have the discipline and know what you're doing to use them properly.
  • TickleSteve 11y ago
    The languages provide the mechanism.... The developer provides the skill needed to produce the organisation.
  • jeremiep 11y ago
    The abstractions provided by Java and C++ aren't very good compared to those provided by, say, Haskell and Clojure. For the most part, design patterns exist merely to fix the lack of a simpler lambda construct in the language. They more often than not add complexity rather than remove it. The biggest balls of spaghetti code I've ever seen we're always OOP with design patterns. I've seen far more clean C codebases than Java or C++ ones.
    • nly 11y ago
      C++ has lambdas and the standard library is, although baroque, heavily functional and well thought out.
      • jeremiep 11y ago
        My bad, I should've specified legacy C++. You're right that with lambdas now C++ has gotten much better. However I would argue against the STL being well thought out. Every single large-scale C++ project I've worked on threw it out the window before even staring out. Our current project already takes an hour and a half to compile without parallel builds and barely uses templates at all. I still prefer plain old C to C++ most of the time.
• deleted 11y ago
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• BerislavLopac 11y ago
  This pretty much aligns with my take on that from four years ago: http://berislav.lopac.net/post/13061099545/the-most-important-skill-for-software-developers http://berislav.lopac.net/post/13061099545/the-most-importan... As wise men said: All problems in software can be solved with more layers of abstraction, except of the problem of too many layers of abstraction.
• jondubois 11y ago
  I agree that it is an important skill in engineering to recognize when the complexity got too high - At that point you need to take a step back (or several steps back) and find a different path to the solution - Sometimes that means throwing away large amounts of code. It's about acknowledging (and correcting) small mistakes to make sure that they don't pile up into a giant, disastrous one. Another thing I learned is that dumb, explicit code is highly desirable - It's better to have 10 dumb components to handle 10 different use cases than 1 clever component that can handle all 10 cases. I think the most important skill is being able to break down problems into their essential parts and then addressing each part individually but without losing track of the big picture.
  • mmcconnell1618 11y ago
    I agree. I like to remember that I'm passing code into the future where I might not be working on it anymore. Clear, well named code helps the next developer far more than an obtuse algorithm that smashes all logic into a single line.
    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Almost always this is true. But mature code has been iterated over, and some critical places the code has been optimized out of clarity. Nothing helps then but a document - comments are just not enough to explain the crooked road that lead straight to that solution.
  • Gracana 11y ago
    > Another thing I learned is that dumb, explicit code is highly desirable I knew for a long time that "dumb" code was easier to reason about, but it wasn't until I started looking at compiler output and profiling my code that I realized being "clever" in the source text really didn't matter. Now I'm quite happy to write code in the most straightforward fashion, rather than foolishly "compress" things. I imagine the same experience could be enlightening for a lot of newbie and intermediate programmers.
    • 11y ago
• bikamonki 11y ago
  No part of a system is the most important part, from a car to a huge organization, all parts are equally required to interact and hence make such system 'work'. Having a clear functional organization at the start (and respect it throughout development) is very important, but after that is equally important to code clean and efficient code, to test, to debug, etc. Then, going up and dow on the solution stack is important to make the right decision on hardware, OS, server, services, etc.
  • erikb 11y ago
    Okay, if you need to be so detailed you also have to argue keep in mind that some parts are more important than others. Example with the car: If you leave out the head-rest you might sell your car for a few bucks less or have a harder time to get a customer (low importance), but if you have a car without some kind of motor you don't even have a car (high importance). While there are many things that are important they all have different priorities, though. All that said I'm also very sceptical that there is one thing you can learn and then you are a the best programmer. You have to learn thousands of things. And sometimes learning a currently low priority thing now might save you hundreds of hours of pain further down the road. So it's really hard to say what you have to learn.
    • bikamonki 11y ago
      Nope, a car is not a system that was built to be 'sold', it was built to transport people/things safely. If you remove a part of a system and the system still works as intended, it was not part of the system. The head-rest can be removed and the car will still run but with less safety. Hence: all parts of the system are equally required to interact and make the system do what the system should do.
• ak39 11y ago
  Organisational skill is actually an entrepreneurial skill. I'm learning the hard way that there are two diametrically opposing skills you need to master for both running a business and programming effectively: 1. Skills in Creating 2. Skills in Organising those creations The thing is, the Creating part is always exciting but it's disruptive in nature. The Organising part is boring because it's about taming or tempering the creation in such a way that it can be referenced later on (just like filing your invoices, or timesheets - yuck - but necessary). Unless you've got a systematic method to organise your creations, you will always be alone with your ideas, find it hard to resume creative chains of efforts and ultimately flounder without profit. Both in business and in programming. Damn right it's the most important software development skill.
  • Toine 11y ago
    This is something that I'm learning too, and I'm glad to hear it expressed as simply and clearly as you did, thanks. We learn it when we're kids : "Clean your room (2) before playing with toys (1)". Such a basic concept, so hard to scale.
  • Coincoin 11y ago
    This is why most of my personal toy projects are coded like a 12 years old with giant functions, god objects everywhere and horrible, horrible, one liners. It's liberating. This is also why I like game programming that much. A big chunk of the codebase is throwaway code that won't be transported to the next project. When the final deadline comes, you don't feel bad making hundreds of hacks everywhere, and it's fun.
  • necrodawg 11y ago
    So true. If your business is a mess your code will be a mess.
• Omnipresent 11y ago
  On the topic of organization and related to another post about good Software Development books. What are some books that teach code organization as discussed in this post. One I can think of is "Refactoring" by Martin Fowler. What are some others?
  • Untit1ed 11y ago
    For a novice coder I couldn't recommend Head First Design Patterns enough - the gang of four design patterns are a bit controversial these days but the way it steps you through and makes you think twice about how to organise things was really eye-opening for me back in the day.
  • tempodox 11y ago
    I would submit the main point is: You can't learn that from a book but only from experience. The best balance isn't cast in stone but must be found for each problem domain. As much as you can, do your own experiments and experience the consequences of your decisions yourself. Remember that for nontrivial problems, a usual part of the job is learning exactly what problem it is that you have to solve.
  • davidjnelson 11y ago
    Dealing effectively with legacy code: http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Feathers/dp/0131177052 http://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fea... Clean code: http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882 http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsman...
• markbnj 11y ago
  It's a very important skill for a programmer to have, especially in the modern environment where distributed systems built from many integrated components are the norm. That said, it's awfully difficult to disentangle the various skills needed for programming and assign an importance to each one, mush less to determine which of them is actually most important of all.
• signa11 11y ago
  there is an excellent book by jon lakos called 'large scale c++ design' which treats organizational or physical design of large scale c++ projects (> 1giga loc). highly recommended.
  • bmonkey 11y ago
    I've considered this book a few times, but the following review always stopped me cold: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1ICFUDTH8VXQ5/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0201633620&channel=detail-glance&nodeID=283155&store=books http://www.amazon.com/review/R1ICFUDTH8VXQ5/ref=cm_cr_dp_tit... Any thoughts on it?
    • blub 11y ago
      I would give "API design for C++" by Martin Reddy a shot. The only thing I remember now from the large scale book is to pay attention to compile-time and link-time dependencies, although when I read it I remember that it contained some nice tidbits of info that I had not seen in other books The big takeaway was that the way the project is split into libraries, files, folders etc and how these map to classes, modules and subsystems matters.
• jackreichert 11y ago
  For those not able the view it. [Cacheview](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/06/18/most-important-skill-in-software/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...)
• agounaris 11y ago
  I would add to the conversation the fact that most projects fail on the set of the initial requirements. In my experience so far I have seen that constantly changing what you want the app to do creates a huge mess in the codebase even if you use latest tool and methodologies. Looks like there is a great value to organise your app in way to be able to throw away large chunks of code and start over in case there is a big design change.
• humbleMouse 11y ago
  I like this little article a lot. Personally, I try to write code in a way that reads like a book. Lots of comments, explicit function names, explicit variable names, object names, class names, ect. Talking about languages higher level than C/assembly here obviously. I am amazed at all the code I see that has terrible/too generic names for functions and variables and objects. Some people get so obsessed over short function names, one character variable names, and complicated looking one liner evaluations.
  • pinkunicorn 11y ago
    Totally agree on variable/function names, but for some reason I love complicated one liners. I know its wrong, but its my way of measuring how smart I really am(even though its not).
    • humbleMouse 11y ago
      Much respect to you for acknowledging that it gets your brain off mentally! Need a 12 step program for folks like you. Complicated one-liners anonymous.
• bbotond 11y ago
  The site seems to be down. Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Mf9074z6m7sJ:www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/06/18/most-important-skill-in-software/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Mf9074z...
  • Djehngo 11y ago
    mirror (text for the sake of people trying to find this with ctrl+f)
• edw519 11y ago
  the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity Agreed. very rarely is there some tricky data structure or algorithm that casts a looming shadow over everything else Agreed, BUT... In order to organize, sooner or later, you will have to get clever (with tricky data structures or algorithms). How I have always built something big and/or complex: 1. Add lines of code. 2. Add lines of code. 3. Add lines of code. 4. Holy shit! What have I done? 5. Refactor. 6. Combine similar sections. 7. Genericize with parameter-driven modules. 8. Still too many lines of code! Optimize Step #7 with something clever. 9. Go to Step 1. 2 years later: What the hell was this clever parameter-driven multi-nested process for? Why didn't I just code it straight up? For me, organizing complex code has always been a delicate balance between readibility and cleverness. Don't remove enough lines of code and it's too much to navigate. Remove too many and it's too much to comprehend. Organization + Cleverness + Balance = Long Term Maintainability
  • amelius 11y ago
    From [1]: > Nobody is really smart enough to program computers. Fully understanding an average program requires an almost limitless capacity to absorb details and an equal capacity to comprehend them all at the same time. The way you focus your intelligence is more important than how much intelligence you have. > At the 1972 Turing Award lecture, Edsger Dijkstra delivered a paper titled "The Humble Programmer." He argued that most of programming is an attempt to compensate for the strictly limited size of our skulls. The people who are best at programming are the people who realize how small their brains are. They are humble. The people who are the worst at programming are the people who refuse to accept the fact that their brains aren't equal to the task. Their egos keep them from being great programmers. The more you learn to compensate for your small brain, the better a programmer you'll be. The more humble you are, the faster you'll improve. [1] http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-im-the-best-programmer-in-the-world/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-im-the-best-programmer-in-t...
    • noir_lord 11y ago
      I've always described myself as too dumb to write clever code. I try to imagine that 6 months from now I'll have a critical bug in whatever I'm writing and so I write it for that. Apropos of nothing, I'd love an editor that could completely hide (not collapse) comments, as when something I write them I don't need them so hiding them would be great but showing them but been able to toggle them on later would be awesome.
• tome 11y ago
  This is why I love Haskell. Haskell seems to increase my ability to manage complexity by one level. Disclaimer: Haskell is not a silver bullet, not a panacea and I'm only claiming a modest increase, not miracles, but it helps me deal with complexity better than any other language I know.
• jdimov9 11y ago
  I agree that most complexity in software systems comes from managing state. So here is a simple solution - stop doing it. Stop managing state. Use the right tools for the job. Most mainstream programming languages are ridiculously inadequate for building any production software of any significant complexity without introducing more problems than you are trying to solve. Use a mature functional programming language that works with immutable data and is designed for building complex industrial systems. Use a language that was designed from the beginning with the understanding that your software WILL be full of bugs and errors, yet systems must always continue to run. Use Erlang.
  • philbarr 11y ago
    Here we go again with the "functional programming will solve all your problems" thing. It won't. Every language has it's inadequacies.
    • NovelSpinGames 11y ago
      Some inadequacies are much bigger than others. The two big ones for me are nulls AKA the billion dollar mistake and mutability by default. I agree that functional programming won't solve all your problems, but it has a lot of very useful features. Some features, like higher order functions, have made their way to more imperative languages. I use higher order functions all the time in my C# programming. And a lot more functional features (or at least F# features), such as tuples, pattern matching, records, and immutable types, are in the C# 7 worklist: https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/2136 https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/issues/2136
  • crimsonalucard 11y ago
    There's gotta be performance drawbacks to immutable state.
    • Retra 11y ago
      How so? You can optimize immutable state into mutable state in most cases where it would be a performance issue.
• yessql 11y ago
  Oh, I thought the most important skill in software development would be SCRUM.
  • ExpiredLink 11y ago
    You certainly are a manager, not a developer.
• jblow 11y ago
  It is a reasonable point that organization is important but I have to disagree about "most important". The most important skill in software development, by far, is managing your own psychology.
• scuba7183 11y ago
  Text only mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/06/18/most-important-skill-in-software/&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
• snarfy 11y ago
  There is a term for it. It's called managing scope. I'm surprised the article didn't mention this.
  • kyberias 11y ago
    No, that's a totally different thing. The scope (requirements) of the software might be huge but the software could be designed and implemented cleanly and with maintainability in mind. Yet the scope might be tiny and the implementation a mess. This article discusses the skill of taking a mess and turning it into something clean.
    • snarfy 11y ago
      I guess it depends your usage of scope. One is used in defining the problem, the other, the solution. I'm thinking of it's usage when describing the solution.
• evandrix 11y ago
  page not found
  • shaneofalltrad 11y ago
    seems we overloaded the server
• brazzlemobile 11y ago
  Here's the Google cache if someone is looking for a mirror: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/06/18/most-important-skill-in-software/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.joh...
• jimbokun 11y ago
  I disagree with the premise that organizing code is not a recognized or appreciated skill among developers. At least not since this was published: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Design-Existing-Code/dp/0201485672 http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Design-Existing-... Martin Fowler really struck a chord all the developers trying to do the right thing by cleaning up badly structured code, by giving the practice a name and explaining why it's important. Refactoring is definitely a widely acknowledged and accepted practice today, although probably more so in some communities than others.
• knodi123 11y ago
  Mirror since the site is currently down: The most important skill in software development Posted on 18 June 2015 by John Here’s an insightful paragraph from James Hague’s blog post Organization skills beat algorithmic wizardry: When it comes to writing code, the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. I’ve worked on large telecommunications systems, console games, blogging software, a bunch of personal tools, and very rarely is there some tricky data structure or algorithm that casts a looming shadow over everything else. But there’s always lots of state to keep track of, rearranging of values, handling special cases, and carefully working out how all the pieces of a system interact. To a great extent the act of coding is one of organization. Refactoring. Simplifying. Figuring out how to remove extraneous manipulations here and there. Algorithmic wizardry is easier to teach and easier to blog about than organizational skill, so we teach and blog about it instead. A one-hour class, or a blog post, can showcase a clever algorithm. But how do you present a clever bit of organization? If you jump to the solution, it’s unimpressive. “Here’s something simple I came up with. It may not look like much, but trust me, it was really hard to realize this was all I needed to do.” Or worse, “Here’s a moderately complicated pile of code, but you should have seen how much more complicated it was before. At least now someone stands a shot of understanding it.” Ho hum. I guess you had to be there. You can’t appreciate a feat of organization until you experience the disorganization. But it’s hard to have the patience to wrap your head around a disorganized mess that you don’t care about. Only if the disorganized mess is your responsibility, something that means more to you than a case study, can you wrap your head around it and appreciate improvements. This means that while you can learn algorithmic wizardry through homework assignments, you’re unlikely to learn organization skills unless you work on a large project you care about, most likely because you’re paid to care about it.
  • jaytaylor 11y ago
    Here's an archive.org cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20150622134205/http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/06/18/most-important-skill-in-software/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150622134205/http://www.johndc...
• o_nate 11y ago
  Or in other words: code should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. I guess you could call it organization or readability or just good design. It requires deeply understanding what you're trying to accomplish and structuring your code to reflect that. I don't think there's any rote, step-by-step procedure that will get you there. Often it is a flash of creative insight that breaks the log-jam and reveals the hidden inner structure of the problem. Once that is revealed the code writes itself. In other words, good code should always make the problem that was solved look easy.
  • blakeyrat 11y ago
    Developers understand the word "simple" in different ways. I personally think of the UI/API: what the code exposes to the outside world should be "simple". Some people might think about language features. "Simple" is being very selective about what language features you use and what you avoid. Others might think design patterns, and think the code is "simple" when you can point to any class and immediately recognize what pattern that class implements. I've come to learn the word "simple" as in KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) isn't very useful at all.
    • o_nate 11y ago
      I was thinking of more than the UI/API, although I agree that should be simple as well. I think the internals of the code should be simple, in the sense of being constructed out of simple parts with each part being simply connected to the other parts. This means each method should have a clear purpose and it should accomplish it cleanly without surprising side-effects, and that the flow of method calls should be straightforward.
• mathattack 11y ago
  This has been my experience too. I've been involved cleaning up a half dozen or so projects that got out of control. In each case, technical complexity was blamed as the reason. After digging in, I found that following commonalities: - Incomplete, conflicting and misunderstood requirements. - Lots of "We never thought we would need to do X". - Poor team communication. - Mistrust, frequently well earned. - Harmony valued over truth. Once these were winnowed away, the problems rarely overwhelmed the technical teams. This isn't to diminish the importance of technical skills. Rather - when everything else is f*cked up, you can't blame the technology or expect a 10xer to pull you out of it.
  • crpatino 11y ago
    The advantage of the 10x-er is that he will be reporting directly to a Jr. Executive and therefore cutting ahead of the middle management echo-chamber. If you genuinely can write code 10x as fast as the average developer, and get feed requirements through a 10x faster channel, that would be the life! I suspect that's where the mythical 100x developer comes from.
    • mathattack 11y ago
      I agree. There are actually two 10x things that can happen - sometimes in one person. One is choosing the right things to do the first time around. The other is doing them very efficiently. When you get a developer who intuitively understands the domain, and programs very quickly, the sky is the limit. I certainly don't intend to diminish the impact of these 10x developers, just that projects generally get messed up independent of developer quality.
  • BurningFrog 11y ago
    Cleaning up buggy legacy code is a goldmine for learning what not to do.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• zackangelo 11y ago
  Aside from personal discipline and experience, I’ve found that using strongly typed and compiled languages combined with good tools are the best way to accomplish this. Being able to search for and manipulate symbols at the AST level goes a long way towards eliminating any resistance to refactoring.
• grandalf 11y ago
  In a recent job I ended up rewriting some of the codebase with this kind of stuff in mind... the results: - 10% of the LOC as previously - Code significantly more understandable - Jr. developer on the team suddenly became a rockstar b/c he could understand what was going on.
  • notNow 11y ago
    Reducing LOC is not always necessarily a good thing. I'd always favor a more readable codebase that takes some effort to explain its purpose than terse one that is vague and obscure that makes your head spin trying to figure out its raison d'etre
    • grandalf 11y ago
      I agree. In this case the code got significantly better organized and more readable in the process.
• linkregister 11y ago
  Google cache, for those experiencing connectivity issues. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Mf9074z6m7sJ:www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/06/18/most-important-skill-in-software/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Mf9074z...
• Beltiras 11y ago
  I disagree. Communication is the most important. It's the number one cause of failed software project. Miscommunicated features, capabilities, scope, failure to name a few. My favourite is the last one. Not standing up and recognizing that an approach is not working due to fear has to stand out as a big one.
• DevPad 11y ago
  Yeah, the best developers I've ever seen are about simplifying things, avoid overcomplication for too much "flexibility". The zen of Python https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ say: Simple is better than complex.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• petejansson 11y ago
  Relevant: http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-big-bowl-%E2%80%9Cspaghetti%E2%80%9D-code http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintende... Summary: Toyota settled an unintended acceleration lawsuit connected with analysis of the source code for a 2005 Toyota Camry showed it was defective "spaghetti code." There'a a lot of poorly-organized code in the world, and a typical excuse for not cleaning it up is that "it works" so there would be no return on fixing it. In the Toyota case, the code may have contributed to unintended acceleration, and did result in a legal exposure for which Toyota felt it was necessary to settle a lawsuit.
• pg_is_a_butt 11y ago
  i see "scaling a web server" is still at the bottom of the list, while you idiots whine about whatever-the-fuck. you lose. good day, sir.
• autotune 11y ago
  I take it from his site not loading that the most important skill is learning how to scale your site and ensuring it remains accessible during high load times, or using CloudFlare to at least ensure it gets cached.
• jtwebman 11y ago
  The website is down but here is a link from the archive.org site. http://web.archive.org/web/20150622134205/http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/06/18/most-important-skill-in-software/ http://web.archive.org/web/20150622134205/http://www.johndco...
• thewarrior 11y ago
  Yeah this is so true. I worked on a system where we had to support imperial and metric units. It was done in a pretty bolted on fashion with if statements all over the place. And sometimes it isn't even clear if it could be done in any other way. Any HN'ers have suggestions on how to do it elegantly.
  • notNow 11y ago
    language?
• ljk 11y ago
  I was thinking that recently. The way I try to stay organized is to comment(with timestamp) every time something is changed so I can refer to it later. Does anyone have more tips on how to stay more organized?
• abc_lisper 11y ago
  This is always a good idea. Here are some of the things I do - Establish conventions early; Conventions in managing projects, conventions in code. And stick to those conventions. Be predictable, in the code. Use simple names. - Protect your interfaces. By this I mean, use a central place like a wiki to document your interfaces, so all involved parties may agree upon. Write unit-tests for interfaces. Use libraries like mockito and hamcrest that make it a breeze.(You would lock your home every time you go out, don't you?) - I mentioned this in the previous bullet, but write tests. Write lots of them, write tests that document any tricky, magical behavior. Cover all the cases(A boat with one hole is bad as one with two holes). Cover all the invariants, any thing that you notice but didn't mention in the source code. Write tests for the bugs you just fixed. - If you are developing in Java, please use an IDE. I use Intellij, but Eclipse is good too. It makes refactoring code much easier. Rename fields, pull classes up the hierarchy, create abstract classes, create getters and setters automatically with refactoring tools. I am not against emacs or vi, but it is hard to manage Java's sprawl with them. One of the best programmers I know writes code like it has been generated with a program. It is boring, dull and looks alike in every direction. Every field and method is documented, it says what its purpose is, and why it is needed. He is very fast(fast for a startup, not your average enterprise), accurate and gets a lot of stuff done without magic.
• brobdingnagian 11y ago
  Important according to what metric? Making the software developer feel good, or making the company money? The former is almost certainly true, the latter is almost certainly not.
  • davidjnelson 11y ago
    Avoiding rework can cut costs. Rapid Development by Steve McConnell explains this well.
• crimsonalucard 11y ago
  Since so many people prioritize getting then task done than writing organized/beautiful code more often then not we get code that isn't organized properly. Thus, as a result: Interpreting complexity is by far the most important skill in software development. More-so then organizing complexity.
• agumonkey 11y ago
  And Metalevel complexity. I may have been able to craft beautiful code, but I sensed chaos in the way I operate and manages my own resources / tools. I've seen people being organized at many, if not all, layers, solving problem and solving how to help solving problems. Witnessing that makes me feel calm and envious at the same time. ps: it's also reminiscent of recursion, dogfooding etc.
• joshburgess 11y ago
  "The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity, of mastering multitude and avoiding its bastard chaos as effectively as possible." --Dijkstra :)
• Stratoscope 11y ago
  Out of all the things I know how to do in programming, reducing complexity is probably the one I'm best at. So how do I get a job doing this? Or a series of lucrative consulting gigs? :-) I'm pretty sure I'm not as smart as I used to be, and I'm definitely not as smart or productive as some of the younger programmers I've worked with. (Sorry for the ageist remark!) This may be my secret advantage: I have to keep my code simple enough that even I can understand it. Here's a fun example that I've seen more than a few times in various forms: four-way navigation, either involving up/down/left/right or north/south/east/west, or both. In one (somewhat disguised) project it worked like this: the code had several different modules to provide a keyboard interface for geographic navigation, while keeping the geo code separated from the low level details of key codes and events and such. There was a keyboard manager that mapped keycodes to readable names that were defined in an enum: switch( keyCode ) { case 37: return KEY_LEFT; case 38: return KEY_UP; case 39: return KEY_RIGHT; case 40: return KEY_DOWN; } Then an event manager broadcast navigation messages based on the KEY_xxxx codes: switch( keyEnum ) { case KEY_LEFT: BroadcastMessage( 'keyLeft' ); case KEY_RIGHT: BroadcastMessage( 'keyRight' ); case KEY_UP: BroadcastMessage( 'keyUp' ); case KEY_DOWN: BroadcastMessage( 'keyDown' ); } A navigation manager received these messages and called individual navigation functions: // Don't forget to reverse the directions here events.on( 'keyLeft', function() { moveRight(); }); events.on( 'keyRight', function() { moveLeft(); }); events.on( 'keyUp', function() { moveDown(); }); events.on( 'keyDown', function() { moveUp(); }); These navigation functions panned a map in one compass direction or another: function moveUp() { map.pan( maps.DIRECTION_NORTH ); } function moveDown() { map.pan( maps.DIRECTION_SOUTH ); } function moveLeft() { map.pan( maps.DIRECTION_WEST ); } function moveRight() { map.pan( maps.DIRECTION_EAST ); } Of course most of you reading this can see the problem at a glance: Besides having so many layers of code, how many different names can we give to the same concept? We've got KEY_LEFT, keyLeft, moveLeft, and DIRECTION_WEST that all mean pretty much the same thing! Imagine if math worked like this: You'd have to have two of every function, one for the positive numbers and another one for negative numbers. And probably four different functions if you are dealing with a complex number! That of course suggests a solution: use numbers instead of names, +1 for up and -1 for down, ditto for right and left. And pass these numbers on through any of these layers of code so you only need half the functions. If you need to flip directions along the way (like the left arrow key navigating right), just multiply by -1 to reverse it instead of having to make special cases for each direction name. You might even decide to combine the two axes, so instead of vertical and horizontal, you've got +1 and -1 there too (or 1 and 0, or something that lets you handle both axes with one piece of code). Now you could be down to a quarter of the original code. Unfortunately, I was brought in on this project near the end to help wrap up a few other tricky problems, and all this navigation code was already set in stone. (And to be fair, working and tested, and who wants to go back and rewrite proven code, even if it is four times the code you need?) But this would make a pretty good "how would you clean this code up" interview question!
• wskinner 11y ago
  “Here’s something simple I came up with. It may not look like much, but trust me, it was really hard to realize this was all I needed to do.” This reminds me of something Scott Shenker, my computer networking professor at Berkeley, drilled into us every chance he got: Don't manage complexity. Extract simplicity. Finding complex solutions to complex problems is comparatively easy. Finding simple solutions to complex problems is hard.
  • thirdtruck 11y ago
    > Don't manage complexity. Extract simplicity. I can't second this enough. This is why it's so important to throw away your prototype code, sometimes, instead of trying to fix it. It's also the big value-add of TDD: Well written tests make that extracted simplicity explicit.
• userbinator 11y ago
  I'd say it's not really about "organizing complexity" - because that tends to just push it around somewhere else - but reducing complexity which is most important. In my experience it has been that designs which look "locally simple" because they have such a high level of abstraction are actually the most complex overall. Such simplicity is deceptive. I think it's this deceptive simplicity which causes people to write a dozen classes with 2-3 methods of 2-3 lines each to do something that should only take a dozen lines of code (this is not that extreme - I've seen and rewritten such things before.) Perhaps we should be focusing on teaching the techniques for reducing complexity more than hiding it, and that abstraction is more of a necessary evil than something to be applied liberally. From the beginning, programmers should be exposed to simple solutions so they can develop a good estimate of how much code it really takes to solve a problem, as seeing massively overcomplex solutions tends to distort their perspective on this; at the least, if more of them would be asking things like "why do I need to write all this code just to print 'Hello world', and the binary require over a million bytes of memory to run? Isn't that a bit too much?", that would be a good start.
  • necrodawg 11y ago
    This can be hard sometimes. If the business is a mess then your code will be a mess seeing as your code is just a representation of your business. I work for such a business right now and it's killing me. No amount of high quality code will fix this.
• headShrinker 11y ago
  google cache record: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Mf9074z6m7sJ:www.johndcook.com/blog/2015/06/18/most-important-skill-in-software/&client=safari&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Mf9074z... The server seems to be getting hammered.
• mkramlich 11y ago
  I agree that complexity is far up there. But also risk. Also long term thinking. And net cost or net profit. The more years I have under my belt, I think more and more not only about complexity, but also risk, cost, profit. Code and hardware is just a means to an end. Not the end itself. But yes, seek the minimum amount of complexity to materialize the inherent, necessary complexity. But don't allow a drop of complexity more than that. Architecture astronauts, pattern fashionistas, I'm looking at you. KISS. Spend your complexity dollars where it gives you something you truly need or want. Don't do things Just Because.
• bcheung 11y ago
  I can't load the page, but I would definitely agree with the title. From my own experience programming here are some the most common and best ways to better organize complexity: 1) Create DSLs. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the theory that an individual's thoughts and actions are determined by the language or languages that individual speaks. By creating DSLs we are able to reason about a problem domain with increased efficiency. 2) Reduce cognitive load by reducing state. By reducing the number of variables in a given section of code we can more easily reason about it. values.map (x) -> x * x is a lot more understandable than newArr = [] ; for (i=0; i<values.length; i++) { newArr.push( values[i] * values[i] ); } 3) Build tools to build tools. The history of computing is one of building tools on top of tools. From assembly language to C to high level languages. What is is the next step? I suspect it is some kind of polyglot environment that is a hodgepodge of languages all working together combined with automated code creation from AI.
• ademarre 11y ago
  > Organizing complexity is the most important skill in software development I agree with this profoundly. Unfortunately, complexity is in the eye of the beholder. When comparing solutions to a problem, different developers will not always agree on which is the least complex.
• rsuelzer 11y ago
  This times 1000! The really sad thing is that 9.9 out of 10 technical interviews are all about how many Algo's you know. Even if your job will never require actually implementing a single one. These interviewers do not seem to care at all about the actual process of writing and refactoring code, or what your finished products actually look like. I know plenty of programmers who can write highly optimized code, but do so in a way where it is completely impossible to maintain. It's especially heightened when you are given a problem such as "validate if this uses valid brackets, and you have 10 minutes." When under time constraints to solve what is basically an algorithm 99% of programmers are not going write their best code or write code in the way they would normally write code. If you are using lots of algo's on your programming interviews, I suggest you take a step back and determine if those skills are actually what you want to be testing for in this job. Odds are that it is NOT algo's. Give your interviewer some really sloppy code to refactor into something beautiful. Give them a few hours to work on it, watch how they put the pieces together. If your position isn't going to require someone to write advanced algorithms on daily basis, testing for them only cuts out a huge swath of potential talent. I also think it probably leads to less diversity in your work place, which is a bad thing. A Web Developer will never need to solve the towers of Hanoi problem, but they will need to write clean code that can be maintained by others. </rant>
  • TrophyWipes 11y ago
    Interviewee* And as someone who is about to graduate computer science, your rant makes me hopeful :) I am much better at refactoring and finding patterns than memorizing algorithms and other things (mainly because they are relatively easy to look up). Do you suggest that I try to strike a specific balance between practicing dealing with complexity, optimizing and making code readable, versus actually trying to memorize and implement certain algorithms for learning's sake?
    • rsuelzer 11y ago
      I'm not a computer science grad, and it puts me at a huge disadvantage simply because I never had any formal training about algorithms. And my day job is to write testable, well-designed production quality code. I don't get to spend a lot of time rewriting algorithms, which as you note, can be easily looked up. The fact is that as a full-stack developer I can count with zero fingers the amount of times I've had to use an self-made algorithm in a production system. That being said, I do force myself to practice algorithms thru various coding challenges only because I know that this is the specific skill that will land you a job. Which is a shame. That is not to say that there are not positions that really do require this specific skill, but the vast majority of development positions don't and yet nearly every employer tests their candidates as if their success depends upon their ability to solve an algo in under 5 minutes, instead of their ability to write a good library. It's a disservice to those of us who do not have CS degrees and have learned to code by spending a great deal of our time writing code.
• edpichler 11y ago
  Our humans are "comparing machines". For this reason we tend to valuate people that solve problems more than the ones who never create them. This is really bad. Also, in business, if someone is really good administrator, it seems he never does nothing.
• varchar 11y ago
  Interesting. Most comments seem focused on code complexity. In real life situations the complexity is blend of human interactions (attitude, consistency,team,leads, peers, family, emotions) business, market, competition, budget, time, attrition, unexpected events, and more. Life is complex. Business and workplace dynamics can be complex. People are complex with their own strengths, quirks and situations. Having a broad outlook, developing patience and skills to deal with life and work is part of becoming mature.
• AdieuToLogic 11y ago
  > Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. (source: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/l/laotzu398196.html#rGRvFjhwr4m4FXbJ.99 http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/l/laotzu398196.html...) This applies to systems as much as any thing else it possibly could.
• kriro 11y ago
  """But there’s always lots of state to keep track of, rearranging of values, handling special cases, and carefully working out how all the pieces of a system interact.""" I'm not a functional programming evangelist but that reads like a very good reason to go for FP. I think a similar point was made in "Functional JavaScript". I don't remember it exactly and it's on my shelf at home but there was some passage about the biggest downside of typical OOP codebases being the mental effort of keeping track of values and value changes.
• hamsterdog 11y ago
  Does anyone know of any book or website or other resource that has before and after examples of good refactoring, or something similar?