An Epiphany, Sort Of
Thursday, August 18, 2005
I have a Business Degree and am currently getting a Masters in Software Engineering. I am a self-taught programmer who has been creating web-based applications for close to 10 years. I have always had the mindset that less is more. Anytime I am coding I am always looking for easiest way to do it and in a way using the least amount of code. I am a business man first. Time to market is important, so creating tons of code which try to handle any possible scenario is a waste of time. Spending hours on end trying to create generic reusable code that will most likely be used for only specific task is insane.
My past few jobs have caused me a great deal of stress. All the code written has been over engineered. The original architects have taken Rapid Development out of the picture when they thought all the ?cool? things they built would speed it up. There is a formula: UH = W ? if it ugly and it is hard it is WRONG!
Over the past week I have had several conversations with some friends, all of who are self-taught programmers. We put all our experiences with this together and realized the common denominator is people with Computer Science degrees. I swear some of them think that if the solution is too easy it can?t be right. Yes that is a massive generalization but these are our experiences.
There was one guy I recently worked with who actually took a tag based language (Cold Fusion) and recreated the majority of the tags. He had his own
I needed to vent. My new mantra is - You Arent Gonna Need It.