This was originally an entry in my Rails Conf note series but this talk deserved it’s own post. Sarah Mei give a really insightful talk with a unique way to view software. I will attempt to summarize it here but I would recommend listening to the talk when it comes out.
Summary
Think of software as a creative and iterative process over a purely technical endeavour. The talk began talking about Conway’s Law: The structure of the system a team or organization builds will match their communication structure. This means messiness in communication will translate into messiness in the code base. Often software teams work as independent technical teams when they creative teams. Programming can be creative and the systems we build rely on communicating and novel solutions.
Software is regularly compared to architecture, but Sarah argues that this is wrong. Architecture has three well defined stages:
- Design
- Construction
- Maintenance
These three stages are handled by separate teams and require separate skills. Software used to be built like that, but not any more. Now we have libraries and frameworks that provide the structure. Instead we are living inside of these buildings that are the technologies we choose. These technologies give us the outline and walls with limitations and design choices we must live with or work around. We now focus on making our code livable.
Inside our “home” of code we need to create value and solve problems. Also the happiness that we feel depends on who we live in the code with. Everyone has their own quirks and habits, but together you work and live together. This living together in a house analogy was extended to hoarding and messiness. When you let laziness seep in, little decisions and messes compound until it’s an episode of Hoarders.
The answer to this isn’t to through out the house and start again, the same habits and behavior that made the mess will slowly creep in to the new system. To prevent this mess approach coding with the livable code mindset rules:
- Don’t make it worse.
- Improvement over consistency: but be sure to communicate the direction and goal.
- Inline everything: do the easy things instead of saying you’ll come back to it.
- Talk more about the code.
- Don’t always ask for permission, but be upfront with what you are doing
- Don’t ask for forgiveness
- Be open to feedback but don’t always listen
Code gets messy if care is not regulary cleaned and organized. Blog post and book sample code is comparable to staged homes. Those aren’t livable, just like the showrooms and photos of houses for sale hide the clutter and the things you actually need in a home. This analogy really resonated when she pulled up a photo of a bedroom on a house listing and picked apart how it wasn’t livable. No chargers on the end tables, no dresser, bed was on the floor to make the room feel spacious, etc. This is staged, just like overly abstracted code.
Modern software development is building and using generic components that together build a home, and we live there so keep it livable.
Takeaways
- Think of code as a home, it needs to be livable, you should organize and clean but a little mess is okay.
- Value continous improvement over consistency and correctness.
- Rewriting code will not prevent the next codebase from getting messy, instead fix the process.