My guiding principles after 20 years of programming (2020)

(Forgive the lack of specificities, I tell this as a parable)

A fancy new office tower was opening downtown. Around this time, office space was at a premium so they soon sold out all their floorspace, and the project was considered quite successful except for one small problem; the architect seems to have installed slow elevators.

Tenants began to complain that the ride up to their high, and very expensive, offices was taking too long. These elevators were stupidly slow.

The building management frantically called around the big elevator companies, getting motors upgraded as fast as possible, but the complaints kept coming and in the end no one could quote anything less than $100mil to structurally alter the building to house bigger motors and more shafts.

Then one day an independent construction contractor showed up who offered to do a retrofit to fix the issue for only $10mil. The desperate building management decided to try it.

So the guy took $500k of the money to buy and install a bunch of mirrors in the elevator booths which had been sombre (and expensively) wood-panelled. Sure enough, the complaints stopped coming. (And the contractor got a $9.5mil payday)

The problem wasn’t that the elevators were slow. It’s that people got bored in them (in a world before smartphones). And what do people never get bored of doing? Looking at themselves in the mirror.

Of course, it’s annoying to save the equivalent of 95% of the cost but not see any of that money. You just had to deal with budget cuts that really should have killed any solution. Still a cool party trick I guess.

I believe people underestimate the power of a good IDE.

1. Start small, then extend. Whether creating a new system, or adding a feature to an existing system, I always start by making a very simple version with almost none of the required functionality. Then I extend the solution step by step, until it does what it is supposed to. I have never been able to plan everything out in detail from the beginning. Instead, I learn as I go along, and this newly discovered information gets used in the solution.

I like this quote from John Gall: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.”

From: https://henrikwarne.com/2015/04/16/lessons-learned-in-softwa...

Definitely. And in some parts of the tech world, people actually deride the usage of an IDE! "If you're not using vim you're a newb," kinda deal.

Which, sure, vim is great! And you can get a lot of decent plugins that can make that workable. But gosh IDEs provide so much powerful functionality, why would you make your life harder on purpose by not using them.

That attitude does seem to be fading though, in my more recent experience.

I cannot disagree more. Code lingers. I work on an 13 years old code base that is considered new by internal standards and it's not uncommon to see lines that haven't been touched for 10+ years.