Getting things working
I've noticed an ebb and flow pattern in my coding style, a messy phase followed by a clean up phase.
The messy phase is when I'm just trying to get new things working smoothly. I'm trying lots of things, mangling the existing code to play with the new, seeing what works well, what's elegant and what's crufty. And as I do, the quality and organization of the code goes to complete shit, all while the design is hopefully improving.
The clean-up phase happens once I feel satisified the hacks are minimal and the design is solid. During clean-up I start making sure all the variable, method and class names are decent, all the bits of code are in the right files and all the files have good names.
Then I sit and take some pride in my nice clean project. Ahhh, so nice!
And the next day I start to mess it up again with the next round of features. Circle of life and all that crap.
Posted November 15, 2005 8:37 PM
Comments
Sounds like watching porn.
Anonymous, November 16, 2005 1:47 PM
i love these posts where you are talking about the creative process. i think no matter what you are doing creatively, writing code, painting, writing a novel, composing music, there are common algorithms. people who are connected to the process are usually very productive, and create interesting things.
jonvon, November 16, 2005 4:11 PM
I love to build this that are clean, elegant and "pure". Then the users get hold of them and I find my design being muddied by obscure business rules or tweaks to work around certain real world anomolies. Then I get the sh!ts as I'm forced to make my "pure" design impure :-(.
Brendon Upson, November 16, 2005 6:48 PM
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