I started on a new project last week. I started the way I usually do, with a sketch of how it should work, inputs, outputs, and a general idea of the data flow. Then I did a rough prototype. Progress was pretty fast, partly because the concept is simple, and partly because I wrote something similar for a past employer. After hacking on it over the weekend, I spent yesterday doing “cleanup” to get it ready for actual use. Yesterday afternoon I realized that, despite getting quite a bit done, I felt I had hardly made a dent in my “todo” list for the project.
This made me ponder. I feel as though the speed at which I can complete a given project has fallen since I was a kid. I remember being 13 or so and starting something after dinner, staying up all night, and having a working application in the morning. Has something changed since then? Or is it just my perception or poor memory?
On the one hand, the “quality” of the code I write today is much higher. For instance, when I was a kid I saw no problem with using a text field as the canonical storage for a piece of data. I also remember a lot of deeply nested branching statements and extremely long functions. Code quality certainly explains some of the “slowdown” I perceive.
But there is more to it. I didn’t write crappy code as a kid because I had no choice. In some cases I actually knew better, and I certainly had no shortage of books from which I could have learned the rest. As I thought about my younger self during my walk to the metro station last night I realized that the greatest difference between my younger self and my present self is that my younger self didn’t expect to have to maintain any of the code he wrote. Once it was finished, it was finished, I moved on to the next project (in a way, this reflected the prevailing software release cycle of the time, I’m not sure if that influenced me in any way).
Today, I expect to have to maintain the code I write. Every time I write a line I unconsciously consider whether I’ve just written a check I’ll be asked to cash later. This means I rewrite more lines than I used to, or take longer to write them the first time (more thinking, less coding). It also means that I test and document more.
Oh well, back to (slowly) writing code.
GOTO 10 Line 