erik.wiffin

Or: Why is this software engineer being so difficult? So you’ve got some data. In my case, I’ve been keeping track of how successful my taco truck has been. There’s nothing crazy here: a date column, how many of each kind of taco I sold, and where I parked my taco truck that day. At this point, I’d like to create some sweet visualizations of my data, to better understand the fundamentals of my taco truck business.

When confronted with a complicated task, the first response of any developer is to dive in and start coding. This is precisely the wrong thing to do. I might sound hyperbolic, but it’s true. Every single design plan I have ever seen has resulted in a better understanding of the problem, and more importantly, a better solution delivered faster. What is a design plan? A design plan is a short document describing a proposed implementation of a new feature or refactoring.

The only way to perfectly estimate how long a task will take, is to do the task and measure how long it took. In most situations where you’re endeavoring to produce an estimate, this is not a practical way of providing it. At the other end of the spectrum, you can pick a random number and base your timeline on that. While this is a quick and easy way of coming up with an estimate, it is rarely helpful.

What does it mean to be a professional software developer at an agency? If you’re familiar with some of the big names in books about software design - books like Design Patterns, Code Complete, Domain-Driven Design - you may have noticed that they all share a particular assumption: you are working at a product company, on a single codebase, and there is a good chance you will be working on that same codebase five years from now.