In my previous post, I wrote about Silver Bullets, and how they're a dangerous thing to strive for when writing software. Naturally I'm not the first person to write about them
Jeff Atwood's "Quantity Always Trumps Quality" deals with the underlying cause of Silver Bullet Syndrome – trying to design the perfect system. When I first read the headline, I was already getting ready to disagree, but it makes a very valid point. If you're not writing code, you're no learning. Theorizing about best practices and architecture is all well and good, but you can only see things go wrong when you actually code them and see how they work.
"I'll get to your application in a minute - First, we need to build the framework" by Jeffrey Palermo looks at the problem from a web developer's point of view. The environment may be different, but the problem remains the same. Well worth a read.
2 Comments
I agree with Atwood's post, i find proofs-of-concept to be very effective (and necessary). On the other hand, as Palermo points out, it may add additional overhead to a project so you often need to do it on your own time.
I've realized that i will never write something exactly right the first time, that's why i'm so eager to get first-versions out of the way. In software development, experience is perhaps more important than anything else.
I've realized that i will never write something exactly right the first time