A common lie in programming is that every project is new, that no problem has been seen before. This is the reason given for estimates being bad, for plans being bad, for design being bad…for anything other than diving in uninformed being bad.
But I’ve noticed that more and more frequently my discussions about problems-technical problems, organisational problems, personal problems-involve the phrase “when I had that problem”. That somebody (and, as time goes on, that’s more frequently me) has seen this problem or one with many similarities before.
It’s time to stop pretending that your UI fronting a database table is up there among the Hilbert problems as one of the big research questions of the 21st century. We have seen that before, or something like it, and we tried things, some of them worked. They probably weren’t the best possible solutions but they were solutions.
