Get it working then make it better.
I have recently been doing some research into Open Source, its an interesting subject from so many perspectives. That’s not what this article is about but if you want to follow up on it I recommend The Success of Open Source. Anyway reading this book prompted me to think a bit more about daily builds. Yes I know I already posted on this topic a few days ago but I can’t resist linking it with the Linux philosophy which can be summarised as:
“get it working then make it better”
Now this really appeals to me for a few reasons:
- I am a pretty poor programmer, a reasonable designer and a pretty good architect, (hopefully :-)). So I incline to grand concepts, but I can never get them to work in code unless I start really simply. In fact in most cases I start with someone elses code first and hack it around until I have proved the basic concepts.
- My real background is in systems integration so I never expect anything to work as documented. In fact when I started programming with VB 2, I fell found of a whole …