magpiebrain

In an uncharacteristically expletive-light post, Hani talks about the difficulty of defining what good design is:

So what’s the acid test for a good design? I have no idea. The closest I could come up with is A good design allows your code to do things you never expected it to have to do.

I dislike this definition for a few reasons – at least one of which Hani himself touches on:

It’s not about ‘oh I’ll add an interface here so I can plop in different implementations’ when there’s no sane reason you’d ever need more than one implementation, for example.

That is to say using Hani’s definition as a maxim for what makes good design could lead to designs which violate the ever sensible YAGNI principle.

First and foremost, a good design needs to make it easy to do what you are doing right now. There is no point having a design to support future (potential) requirements which makes your current work a pain to do. YAGNI follows from this principle. Second it needs to be easy to change. This can come from having small, loosly coupled, highly-cohesive code. Both of these things require a design that is easy to understand – not just in the sense of “Can I understand the code?” but in terms of all members of the team being able to share a mental picture of the same design.

Good design is inherently contextual. Design that is good today, might not be good for tomorrow. But if your design (which inevitably means your code) is easy to change, it can be made good again.

A cracking quote from a client:

A consultant is someone who in exchange for your watch will tell you the time

Being a consultant right now I’m not sure whether or not to be offended…

I’ve created some full post category-specific feeds (thanks to a great tutorial) . In total there are now 13 category or top level feeds available in addition to feeds for each individual post so you can keep up with any comments or trackbacks that get left.

As always if you don’t see what you want then drop me a line.

Please note, there are:

• Lies
• Damn Lies
• Statistics
• Bloggers

• Fox News

  In decreasing levels of accuracy and balance. Of course this site is the exception that proves the rule…

  That means the next time you hear some blogger raving about something, for the love of $Deity consider that you might not be suckling at the teat of truth, and perhaps instead the putrid orifice of lies.

I’ll be at Open Tech 2005 on Saturday, as it looks interesting and its damn cheap (five of your UK pounds). Topics include blogs, copyright concerns, webservices, and the offical launch of backstage.bbc.co.uk’s developer network – aimed at providing ways to open up BBC’s content so Joe public can program a webservice for it or something. Most importantly it starts at the highly civil hour of 11:30am.

If you’re coming along I’ll be the skinny geeky guy with an under-developed social life and too many gadgets. I should be easy to spot.

Way before I started looking at a cruise control plugin for trac, Tammo van Lessen had been developing one of his own. Tammo’s solution uses XSLT to parse the cruise control logs – and it looks very similar to the cruise reporting application as a result. The big added benifit of course is that it integrates with trac (so no need for a servlet engine to display your logs). The current plan is that myself and Tammo will try and merge our efforts at some point, but until then I recommend you have a look at Tammo’s excellent work if you’re currently using trac and CruiseControl.

They fixed it. Seems it was down to a hardware outage. Withdraw the kitten!

Bloglines has decided to eat all my feeds – I hope it’s a temporary outage or I’ll send the kitten round.

It’s OK everybody, there is no point comparing Django and Rails, Obie has it sorted:

There’s one problem dude… No matter how good Django is, it isn’t written in Ruby.

You see, that’s what so great about Obie – he can deliver a balanced, reasoned comparison without letting language politics get in the way.

“It’s all gone quiet over there”
“You’re going home in a rather disappointed ambulance”
etc.

This has been a public service announcement from the Smug Londoner Party.

Don’t they know this is the UK? If you’re over here letting off fireworks, you bloody well better be burning the effigy of a Catholic, and it better be November.

Bastards!