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The Duct Tape Programmer
theodp writes "Joel Spolsky sings the praises of The Duct Tape Programmer, who delivers programming teams from the evil of 'architecture astronauts' who might otherwise derail a project with their faddish programming craziness. The say-no-to-over-engineering attitude of the Duct Tape Programmer stems not from orneriness, but from the realization that even a 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it's in your lab where you're endlessly polishing the damn thing. Like Steve Jobs, Duct Tape Programmers firmly believe that Real Artists Ship."
hahaha. you know, I once had a boss that would make stupid statements like that, how he could have done xyz in minutes. one day I threw the keyboard at him and said, "you are full of shit, show me!" that stopped his b.s. bragging to me at least, though he continued to b.s. everyone else.
But remember, on numerous occasions Joel has stated how much he disagreed with the plan to rewrite mozilla from scratch. For example: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Stop intellectual property from infringing on me
I keep seeing this "good enough" meme going around. At a company meeting, recently, management was espousing the same crap.
I can only hope that these people are plagued with "50%-good" products. 50%-good tires, that blow out ocassionally, causing an accident. Maybe Joel would like some 50%-good surgery, or a 50%-good pacemaker. How about getting to fly in 50% good airplanes for the rest of his life?
I'm not surprised that most of this bullshit is coming out a culture in which Walmart was able to become the success it has. We needed something for a weekend project recently and bought the materials from Walmart, because it was closest. What poor quality crap. It'll all need to be replaced in a year, contributing to landfill and wasted resources. I'm not going purchase from Walmart any more, and I'm not going to spend money on half-baked, crap-quality software, either.
Word gets around about quality. It's the American auto-maker's nightmare right now. Ford, Chrystler, Chevrolet... they're all struggling to reverse decades of built-up public perception about poor quality, even when some of them are actually making fairly decent cars right now. It isn't quite the same with software; Microsoft has been making crap software for, well, ever, and they're still dominant. But I think that if you take the monopoly factor out of it, software companies *do* suffer from delivering half-assed product to their customers.
Unit tests are only as good as the programmers who make them. And if the programmer can think of a unit test... chances are that his code has already accounted for it; after all it's the same person, and he will be in the same mindset as he was when writing the code in the first place.