Coding by the Beach

This is a repost from my main blog at http://www.wiputra.com

No, I’m not talking about that kind of shopping where I’d go to a mall and spend a whole month’s salary there. Nobody does that except women who need better men in their lives (Women, please date geeks. You won’t regret it.).

This kind of ’shopping’ can potentially be more evil than that. It is when we are early in the design stage of software development, and there is nothing technical that has been decided whatsoever.

So you ask, what should I begin with? Should I code from scratch? Should I use a framework? If I use a framework, which one should I use?

Considering the number of software frameworks out there (even Apache alone has dozens of them… and at least three for database management alone) it is possible that we might spend weeks, even months, just trying them out. In the meantime, the client keeps paying us, and we are unaware that they are watching us unhappily, as though we are sucking their money out of them without giving anything in return.

So what do we do? How do we get around this issue of ‘eternal shopping’?

I guess we should set some time to play around with a framework or two, and then get on with our lives. An application may not be better if we write it from scratch. It may not be more efficient, and it may not even be as maintainable. But there is one thing that we can do with the software we wrote on our own that we can not do with a framework.

That one thing is…… if it doesn’t work well enough, throw it all out and start again.

What do you think?