| ▲ | datadrivenangel 13 hours ago |
| "There's plenty of space for "disposable and single use software." Sure, to a trained software engineer, this might be "bad code" but doing today's task has value, even if the code that performs that task isn't "accretive."" Grant me the serenity to accept the bad code i shouldn't fix, the courage to change the code I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. |
|
| ▲ | gota 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Grant me the serenity to accept the bad code i shouldn't fix, the courage to change the code I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Well, It's really early in the morning and I've got the quote of the day already |
| |
| ▲ | douglee650 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | live, laugh, cruft | | |
| ▲ | cgriswald 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Though I walk through the valley of technical debt I shall fear no eval |
| |
| ▲ | minitoar 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is a slightly modified version of the serenity prayer of AA fame. | | |
| ▲ | gota 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, I know, but I substituted that one in daily usage for just shouting "SERENITY NOW" at maximum volume. | | |
| ▲ | narag 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That seems similar to the "God give me patience, but I need it RIGHT NOW" prayer. | |
| ▲ | Terr_ an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > shouting "SERENITY NOW" at maximum volume. I'm imagining the Silicon Valley scene where the character Gilfoyle has set up a loud death-metal automated noise that plays whenever the price of Bitcoin meets certain conditions... except the trigger is some kind of code-quality metric, the effect is my machine shouting at me to become serene. |
|
|
|
|
| ▲ | wodenokoto 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That quote also resonated with me. It reminded me of "Perl, the write-only language"-meme of yore. And I think there is a place for perl, just like there is a place for bash one-liners. The authors example is personal software. The things we write to scratch our own little itches, that do not need to be shared or developed together with other people. |
|
| ▲ | KolibriFly 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The real trick is recognizing when "disposable" code has quietly become infrastructure |
| |
| ▲ | Terr_ an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I've been (unsuccessfully) trying to coin the phrase "design for deletion": All code in front of you will become unfit and unsalvageable, and your goal is to ensure that when it happens, someone can safely and sanely remove it. There's overlap with ideas like modularity and decoupling, but the emphasis is different, it shouldn't lead people into architecture-astronautics or trying to be vicariously immoral through their work. | | | |
| ▲ | dhruvmittal 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Law of disposable infrastructure: The more temporary a fix is intended to be, the more likely it is to become load-bearing permanent infrastructure | |
| ▲ | toss1 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Exactly THIS! I found an excellent way to avoid premature abstraction and optimization and to write better software in general was to explicitly consider v1.x a throw-away. Build something expedient that works well enough to deploy in the field, get actual user feedback and system metrics (e.g., where are the actual bottlenecks). Do a few iterations on user feedback and system metrics. NOW, you are much further down the road to a true final spec, and you can use that real information to design the real system to scale up on. One Test Is Worth A Thousand Opinions. This plan first tests your ideas against the real world of users, hardware, and data flows, and keeps a lot of technical debt out of the scaling system. I discovered it a bit by accident, having previously been really big on early abstraction and planning, but sort of having to do this in one startup, and it was a real eye-opener how well it worked. |
|
|
| ▲ | delecti 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Part of why I like "tech debt" as a term. Much like actual financial debts, some tech debt has a low enough interest rate or is easy enough to declare bankruptcy on that it's not worth paying off. |
|
| ▲ | stuaxo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| We used to keep it in it's own separate thing: Microsoft Excel. |
|
| ▲ | lifeisstillgood 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| >>> Grant me the serenity to accept the bad code i shouldn't fix, the courage to change the code I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Fantastic |
