I remember back when I was starting to learn programming, my very first days with my hands into the code. As a new guy on this huge and new world for me, everything seemed so perfect, so smartly built, so complex and magical. I just loved everything about it. Reading books and watching tutorials for hours and hours started to become my new lifestyle. I, started to learn how to create my own magic, to write those complex and smart lines of code…
But then, something really changed… I was not a new guy on the coding world anymore. Things I wanted to create required more work to do and hours and hours slowly became days and days. Smart and complex solutions were just becoming more and more complex but not smarter. Complex was not magical to me anymore!
Something really changed… All those years admiring complex works of other people, thinking how smart one should be to write such number of lines of code, to work on such huge code bases… I thought that should be very hard to do. And yes, it was; not smart and absolutely not efficient anyway.
Something really changed… I started to learn how not to love complex anymore. I started to love something else, quite the opposite in fact. Yupp, you are right: simplicity.
I started by replacing many rows on many places in my code with some tiny lines that were doing the same job. Creating service classes and functions were becoming my hobby. I started developing new ways of thinking. I was really enjoying it. I thought that thinking simple would solve many of my problems and on top of that, it would be more easy. But ohhh boy, how wrong was I.
I never thought that creating something simple would be so hard. It was unbelievable what I found. May I present to you the irony itself: The hardest and most complicated part of my job was creating something simple.
I found myself many times knowing how to do or write something but thinking very hard because I wanted it to be and to look simple. But you want to know what’s the funniest (not so) part: How do you tell someone that you’re thinking so hard just to create something simple? People want results. They don’t really care if it’s simple or it’s complicated, they want something they can see, they can touch…
But I didn’t care either. I was creating my own magic and I wanted to do that by my own rules. And of course people asked again and again, why I was taking so much time just to make something simple, why I was obsessed with this word. My answer to that was: I’m doing a favor to my future self, I’m saving HIS time!
Simplicity is smart, simplicity is worth it…
Discussion