I'd love to see what YCs guidance on code quality is. My guess is "ship it if you get users".
Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough”
71–80 of 130 posts
Re: Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough”
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’ve created a concept and attached the word “perfect" to it. Your concept is different than the shared definition. This leads to disagreements, misunderstandings, and (as you said) twitching. The purpose of words is to share information. If you have write a paragraph describing your definition when you use a word, use a different one.
Not really. When I look up the definition, it is 'completely free of faults or defect'. I don't think I've strayed past that meaning.
yes you have. you've moved it into the subjective by requiring pleasing aesthetics
Re: Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough”
#73I'd love to see what YCs guidance on code quality is. My guess is "ship it if you get users".
"If the building isn't on fire you're not iterating fast enough"
Re: Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough”
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The “real work” is in figuring out how to move forward from something like that, and lots of stress comes from trying to do so without breaking anything. I'm a lot more impressed with the evolution of the human species than how doctors have been able to maintain those running systems. You want to design a human from the ground up using proper infrastructure that doesn't have ailments or diseases go ahead. you'll be…
The human body is the result of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000+ organisms dying before or after reproducing. That's evolution. It has absolutely nothing to do with the "maintenance" that doctors perform on the human body, especially when doctors are loathed to lose even a single organism. I'm not even sure why I responded to your comment, since it was so random and unrelated to the rest of the thread.
If you think it's so unrelated, then maybe you didn't understand what he was trying to say?
Doctors are necessary and important and deserve to be paid well, since they deal with life. But that can be done by anyone really. I'm not saying any idiot can become a doctor, it's that most doctors do what any other doctor can do.
I'm not interested in those things either. I would rather work on something that can change how people live their lives--which one could arguably say is close to evolution.
Re: Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough”
#75One of the depressing things about code is that it is astoundingly easy to build something that does amazing things in controlled circumstances but is otherwise practically garbage. Promotions, venture capital, and all other manner of rewards can result from said garbage. The “real work” is in figuring out how to move forward from something like that, and lots of stress comes from trying to do so without breaking any…
What you say is indeed important, but I wouldn't say the work before that is not "real work". It's just different types of work. Ask any successful startup founder what their initial codebase was like and they would say--if they're honest--it was shitty.
There's a reason for this. The "real work" you mention comes into play only after the product has reached product market fit and needs scaling. Before that phase, it's all about struggling to make things work, and people don't have time to refactor everytime they need to make a small tweak and experiment. So naturally by the time the "real work" guys come in they will think "WTF the code is so shitty, whoever wrote this is an idiot". But they should know that they're there only because of that shitty code. If they were in that same situation (and rational) they would have done the same thing--write a consequentially shitty code.
Re: Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough”
#76Re: Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough”
#77One of the depressing things about code is that it is astoundingly easy to build something that does amazing things in controlled circumstances but is otherwise practically garbage. Promotions, venture capital, and all other manner of rewards can result from said garbage. The “real work” is in figuring out how to move forward from something like that, and lots of stress comes from trying to do so without breaking any…
"version 1.0 was a rickety mess, all of those guys left, and anyone would be lucky to get the thing working at all, much less in a way that does not introduce any new bugs."
No user cares about any of this. Fix it. Don't try to rationalize shipping garbage.
Re: Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough”
#78I'll copy a Bruce Schneier's quote and say "Software is a process, not a product."
It's no surprise that there's no such thing as perfect code because code is mere reflection of a real-life requirement, which is always somewhat inconsistent and ever changing. Sticking to one static point is, well, pointless.
Re: Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough”
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like most consumer apps incur a crazy amount of technical debt while largely paying people in equity, then if they take off raise a bunch of money to pay other people in cash to sort it all out... Pretty good system actually.
Enterprise apps are no different. Lean startup is doing better in the enterprise than it is in the "startup" world. Early on, every app is laden with technical debt. They barely work. When "barely works" becomes "doesn't work", we fix them just enough so they barely work again, and start piling on more features and functionality. We may build some scaffolding and do some refactoring to prevent dropping into doesn't-w…
"Early on, every app is laden with technical debt. They barely work. When "barely works" becomes "doesn't work", we fix them just enough so they barely work again, and start piling on more features and functionality."
This is the biggest issue, software is seen as something that is built, not something that has to be maintained, improved and extended.
It's amazing how companies can pour tens of millions into the build step and lose that investment by not maintaining and improving it.
Re: Code Is Never “Perfect”, Code Is Only Ever “Good Enough”
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. When I look up the definition, it is 'completely free of faults or defect'. I don't think I've strayed past that meaning.
yes you have. you've moved it into the subjective by requiring pleasing aesthetics
Perfection is subjective because flaws are subjective. Aesthetics are part of the code. If a piece of code is functionally perfect but ugly or inelegant by some measure, then it is imperfect by that measure.