[OT] user-management bit of web apps

[Jeff Anderson]

Let me elaborate a bit more, if allowed. No? Oh well ... here goes anyway. :D

I always like to use the ole "bumps in the rug" analogy. No matter how
many times you push that bump down, it just pops up somewhere else. My
job is to fix problems. My job is made easier if i know exactly what
the problem is, and what part of the code (where) is causing that
problem. Architectures such as MVC seem to exist to try to organize
code in such a way that i can easily find the root, without having
other parts of the system get in the way. Well ... experience has
shown me that no matter how well organized a system is, is still has
problems and there will always be work to do.

Sometimes i think programmers are guilty of being falsely lazy -- we
think we can build some machine that allows us to sit back and not
have to really do any work. Got a problem? I'll just press this button
and viola! Fixed.

This doesn't really corispond with "life as work" however. A miser can
work all his life in such a way and save all of his pennies until he
is rich beyond dreams and never has to work again. Us programmers,
however, are not achieving this working for $Company X (unless we also
are investing our money very very wisely).

So, just do your job! I am not saying that we shouldn't improve our
methods and practices -- we should. But remember that it's just a job.
Your life is more important. I have experienced more frustration
trying to fix a Rube Goldberg machine that is "supposed" to safe time
and effort by using dynamism than i have churning out HTML pages by
hand.

Even this week, i have found myself a "victim" to my own cleverness.
Perhaps it was simply a matter of not completely separating my
concerns, but i can't help but think that if i had instead produced
results first, and then built a system to make extending those results
would have been easier in the long run than trying to build the
extension, so to speak.

A past boss once told me -- "Don't build more than is necessary."  I
think this is good advice for all developers.



On Feb 5, 2008 8:44 AM, Jeff Anderson <captvanhalen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good article!
>
>
> On Feb 5, 2008 7:19 AM, Andy Wardley <abw at wardley.org> wrote:
> > jesse wrote:
> > > ..and I'm not sure I've seen a web framework that actually looks like
> > > what MVC used to mean.
> >
> > Rant!
> >
> > http://wardley.org/computers/web/mvc.html
> >
> > A
> >
>
>
>
> --
> jeffa
>



-- 
jeffa