In the following text, remember that words like me or I are to be construed in the broadest possible terms.
It’s easy to be comfortable with my current level of knowledge. Or perhaps it’s not the value, but the derivative of the value: the amount of investment I’m putting into learning a thing. Anyway, it’s easy to tell stories about why the way I’m doing it is the right, or at least a good, way to do it.
Take, for example, object-oriented design. We have words to describe insufficient object-oriented design. Spaghetti Code, or a Big Ball of Mud. Obviously these are things that I never succumb to, but other people do. So clearly (actually, not clearly at all, but that’s beside the point) there is some threshold level of design or analysis practice that represents an acceptable minimum. Whatever that value is, it’s less than the amount that I do.
Interestingly there are also words to describe the over-application of object-oriented design. Architecture Astronauts, for example, are clearly people who do too much architecture (in the same way that NASA astronauts got carried away with flying and overdid it, I suppose). It’s so cold up in space that you’ll catch a fever, resulting in Death by UML Fever. Clearly I am only ever responsible for tropospheric architecture, thus we conclude that there is some acceptable maximum threshold for analysis and design too.
The really convenient thing is that my current work lies between these two limits. In fact, I’m comfortable in saying that it always has.
But wait. I also know that I’m supposed to hate the code that I wrote six months ago, probably because I wasn’t doing enough of whatever it is that I’m doing enough of now. But I don’t remember thinking six months ago that I was below the threshold for doing acceptable amounts of the stuff that I’m supposed to be doing. Could it be, perhaps, that the goalposts have conveniently moved in that time?
Of course they have. What’s acceptable to me now may not be in the future, either because I’ve learned to do more of it or because I’ve learned that I was overdoing it. The trick is not so much in recognising that, but in recognising that others who are doing more or less than me are not wrong, they could in fact be me at a different point on my timeline but with the benefit that they exist now so I can share my experiences with them and work things out together. Or they could be someone with a completely different set of experiences, which is even more exciting as I’ll have more stories to swap.
When it comes to techniques and devices for writing software, I tend to prefer overdoing things and then finding out which bits I don’t really need after all, rather than under-application. That’s obviously a much larger cognitive and conceptual burden, but it stems from the fact that I don’t think we really have any clear ideas on what works and what doesn’t. Not much in making software is ever shown to be wrong, but plenty of it is shown to be out of fashion.
Let me conclude by telling my own story of object-oriented design. It took me ages to learn object-oriented thinking. I learned the technology alright, and could make tools that used the Objective-C language and Foundation and AppKit, but didn’t really work out how to split my stuff up into objects. Not just for a while, but for years. A little while after that Death by UML Fever article was written, my employer sent me to Sun to attend their Object-Oriented Analysis and Design Using UML course.
That course in itself was a huge turning point. But just as beneficial was the few months afterward in which I would architecturamalise all the things, and my then-manager wisely left me to it. The office furniture was all covered with whiteboard material, and there soon wasn’t a bookshelf or cupboard in my area of the office that wasn’t covered with sequence diagrams, package diagrams, class diagrams, or whatever other diagrams. I probably would’ve covered the external walls, too, if it wasn’t for Enterprise Architect. You probably have opinions(TM) of both of the words in that product’s name. In fact I also used OmniGraffle, and dia (my laptop at the time was an iBook G4 running some flavour of Linux).
That period of UMLphoria gave me the first few hundred hours of deliberate practice. It let me see things that had been useful, and that had either helped me understand the problem or communicate about it with my peers. It also let me see the things that hadn’t been useful, that I’d constructed but then had no further purpose for. It let me not only dial back, but work out which things to dial back on.
I can’t imagine being able to replace that experience with reading web articles and Stack Overflow questions. Sure, there are plenty of opinions on things like OOA/D and UML on the web. Some of those opinions are even by people who have tried it. But going through that volume of material and sifting the experience-led advice from the iconoclasm or marketing fluff, deciding which viewpoints were relevant to my position: that’s all really hard. Harder, perhaps, than diving in and working slowly for a few months while I over-practice a skill.
