Monday, August 3, 2015

Evolutionary programming

I’ve realized that working on Effes is a different beast than working in my day job, primarily due to time and a lack of continuity. It hasn’t been quite as challenging as I thought it would be, but it does result in a slightly different development style.

At work, I come in and get to chew on a problem for hours at a time (modulo the usual office interruptions). If I don’t finish, I’ll pick things up the next day pretty much where I left off, with everything still more or less fresh in my head. But with Effes, I usually work on things an hour here, a half-hour there, maybe a stretch of a few hours on a weekend. Sometimes I won’t have time to work on it for weeks at a time.

So I’ve taken an evolution-like approach to Effes. Good traits are brought in atomically and incrementally; bad traits are culled, but ones that are merely superfluous can stick around for a while. Sometimes I work on pieces that I think will mesh, but I work on them without a grand spec of how to combine them. Instead, I work on each one individually, and then try to stitch them together.

It’s not that I don’t do cleanup (I do!), but the goals are different: there’s less emphasis on a tight, succinct code base, and more on making progress. Less on the ethos, and more on the id.

Two things I haven’t deemphasized are code clarity and maintainability. Like with the day job, those characteristics are vital, since I may not come back to a piece of code for months. On the other hand, if something works fine and is clear, but could maybe be collapsed a bit or consolidated with another class for aesthetic reasons — I have less incentive to do that, since that half hour task might well be the only half hour I get to spend on Effes for two weeks.

These are, of course, skills not unique to my hobby program. I have a bit of a “architectural perfectionist” streak in me, and working on Effes has helped me hone my ability to get things done efficiently, without worrying too much about how pretty they are.

1 comment:

  1. I have the same work/home project split and this is the first time I've seen someone write about it. Thank you for your thoughts! My approach has been to try to make progress on a particular portion of a home project each time I touch it. I usually leave myself a "TODO RESUME HERE" comment so I can grep for where I want to pick up again. :) Of course, that means sometimes I have had to skip working on a home project if the few minutes available aren't enough for the current feature --- it seems your evolutionary approach has the advantage that it can make use of those smaller blocks of time.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.