Your code may be elegant, but mine works

acangiano wrote: post #3

drcongo wrote: post #2

This service is temporarily (and ironically) unavailable.

His server's configuration must be elegant.

Or distinctly inelegant and unable to scale to f*ing working for HN.

Re: Your code may be elegant, but mine works

#6

Post by oinksoft » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 5:00 PM UTC

  > If the client needs a Christmas promotion, and you
  > deliver the best product in the history of promotions --
  > on December 29th -- it's worthless.

Isn't the point to set a deadline that allows the product to be built to a certain standard of quality? If you only ever have time to write untested copy-paste "code that fucking works" then you don't have a problem with your development approach ... unless you're convinced that's the only way to do things.

Re: Your code may be elegant, but mine works

#7

Post by RyanZAG » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 5:00 PM UTC

I managed to read the article before it went down, it was a pretty good read. Hopefully it comes back up soon.

Anyway it makes a good point that business objectives come before "best practices" which I agree with, but you need to be careful when cutting corners that you don't actually sabotage your business objectives. The real discussion is actually on a risk level: if I cut corner X, I can potentially make revenue Y unless cutting corner X causes a problem and I incur loss Z. Cutting that corner is only good if

  P(no problems | cutting corner X) * Y > P (problems | cutting corner X) * Z

If this equation looks tough, it's because it is tough. This is not an easy decision and you really need to be on top of your game to choose correctly. Alternatively, Y must be much bigger than Z and you have some faith in your shortcut. But for most dev work, a lot of the time you're going to be getting that equation wrong if you just guess it and it's why so many experienced devs will tell you not to cut corners.

Re: Your code may be elegant, but mine works

#8

Post by freyrs3 » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 5:01 PM UTC

Reducing software development practices down to these cute catchphrases is a bit disingenuous. If you're writing throwaway code for a client with loose constraints and a tight deadline you'll write code differently then you would when you expect to maintain a long term relationship with a client who expects a high degree of correctness. I'm tired of these trite articles espousing some cute mantra holds as if it's some universal property of software development.

Re: Your code may be elegant, but mine works

#9

Post by notacoward » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 5:02 PM UTC

No it f*ing doesn't. Site down.

Re: Your code may be elegant, but mine works

#10

Post by tdumitrescu » Wed, Feb 05, 2014, 5:04 PM UTC

"This way, though you may be accruing technical debt, you are also accruing revenue immediately, and you can reconcile the debt over time."

The last part of that statement is troubling, because it happens so rarely. I think a lot of devs want to lean towards more engineering "up-front" because they've been smacked repeatedly with the business reality that the first version of that code is what you're going to be stuck working with, and building on top of, for a long time.