It's a strength when doing maintenance work. I usually feel pretty comfortable combing through other people's code.
But it's a big weakness when starting new projects. I often feel like I have no skills what-so-ever in planning a project in a meaningful way. I always throw things together and iterate until it works.
I mean, after over 10 years of working as a developer have an idea what reasonably good things are to throw together for a project, but besides that I'm often lost.
Peter is the former President of the New Zealand Open Source Society. He is currently working on Business Workflow Automation, and is the core maintainer for Gravity Workflow a GPL workflow engine.
What else would you do? I mean code is the expression of a developer. You don't hear painters talking about how their main fault is jumping into painting right away. Or maybe they do? Perhaps they sketch a painting in pencil first? Now if you are developing a system for someone it is a good idea to do storyboards, rough mockups of how things will look, simply to communicate with the customer to ensure you have a common understanding. But there are reasons detailed up front design fails. youtube.com/watch?v=wCFKKDbfoVg
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Jumping into the code right away.
It's a strength when doing maintenance work. I usually feel pretty comfortable combing through other people's code.
But it's a big weakness when starting new projects. I often feel like I have no skills what-so-ever in planning a project in a meaningful way. I always throw things together and iterate until it works.
I mean, after over 10 years of working as a developer have an idea what reasonably good things are to throw together for a project, but besides that I'm often lost.
What else would you do? I mean code is the expression of a developer. You don't hear painters talking about how their main fault is jumping into painting right away. Or maybe they do? Perhaps they sketch a painting in pencil first? Now if you are developing a system for someone it is a good idea to do storyboards, rough mockups of how things will look, simply to communicate with the customer to ensure you have a common understanding. But there are reasons detailed up front design fails. youtube.com/watch?v=wCFKKDbfoVg
Often, I get the feeling, that if I go on, I will end up with a big ball of mud.
I am this comment
The reverse can also be true. Over-analyzing, perfectionism and fear of doing something wrong can be pretty paralyzing at times.
Yes.
I could certainly use some light-weight software project planning framework, haha