Most if not all programmers nowadays are familiar with the concept of clean code. In short, the clean code principle means a development style that focuses on code that is easy to write, understand and maintain. Yet, it seems that often these same principles are not applied to the overall design. Continue reading “Don’t over-engineer”
Tag: design
Don’t build one to throw away, iterate
I recently read the Mythical Man-Month, a collection of essays on software engineering by Frederick Brooks. He writes about his observations and experiences from working at IBM and managing the OS/360 project in the sixties. The book was first published in the 1975 which, I have to say, shows in the examples. Many parts feel a bit dated now (like the discussion how to do time-allocation on a central computer). Still, if you look past the old technical references the essays contain a lot of good general guidelines and observations that are still relevant today.
One of the essays that especially caught my attention was “Plan to Throw One Away”. As the title implies, it suggests that one should throw away the first system and use the lessons learned to build the second, real system.
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