Before I was a geek, I was a Geologist. A Geophysicist to be precise – but mostly I just tell people I was a Geologist. I worked a lot with environmental cleanup, but I also spent a lot of time doing what’s known as “Geotechnical” work – the stuff that happens before buildings are built and holes are dug. It can be kind of boring, but it’s crucially important.
One day I was sitting in our lab with some dark Bay Mud in a crucible, slowly adding water in measured doses and then pouring the mud through a screen and weighing out differences. I won’t bore you with the details – I’ll just tell you that I was 23 and cranky that this is what my career amounted to – a bunch of rigorous nonsense where I got to weigh mud.
I started complaining and mumbling and my boss (who was a patient to no end) filled me in on some details:
What you’re doing, Rob, is measuring the amount of clay that’s in soil at this site. The water you’re using dissolves the clay, and the screen removes the sand from the clay/sand slurry that you’re mixing in the crucible. We need to know how much clay is in the ground so we can know how much it will swell in the winter when it rains. This will keep the building from expanding/contracting and falling over into resultant sinkholes.
I won’t bore you with the rest. Suffice to say this: building things has been around for a long time, and it took a WHOLE LOT of buildings falling over before some smart guys (let’s call them purists) got together and said “we should do it this way”. They then convinced their local governments and boom, the building code is born.
Geek Building Codes
My house is built on volcanic clay that’s been amended to some percentage of clay/sand/aggregate so that my house can stay standing for at least 50 years (not counting hurricanes). I’m pretty grateful for that, because I *absolutely know* that if the builder didn’t need to do it, he wouldn’t. Amending and backfilling that much soil sucks, and I don’t want to depend on the original builder to get that right (cause I tell ya, they skimped on a whole bunch of other stuff that I’ve been fixing!).
Our industry doesn’t have building codes and as such need to compare what we make with what other people make in order to gauge how good our stuff is. That usually results in purse fights and secret clubs, and rarely does much for us as an industry and I can see why people might shy away from engaging in these conversations.
But to stop asking is to stop learning. Worse yet – to suggest that it’s not even worthwhile is utterly absurd. It drives me nuts when people write posts that suggest that principles and standards of quality are cumbersome (even if they didn’t mean to suggest it – which I don’t think Jeff did – read the comments and you’ll know what I mean):
The bigger and more grandiose the set of rules you come up with, the more severe the danger. A few broad guidelines on a paint can begets thirty rules for painting, which begets a hundred detailed principles of painting..
Pretty soon you'll find yourself believing that every possible situation in software development can be prescribed, if only you could come up with a sufficiently detailed set of rules! And, of course, a critical mass of programmers patient enough to read Volumes I - XV of said rules. You'll also want to set up a few messageboards for these programmers to argue endlessly amongst themselves about the meaning and interpretation of the rules.
Now let’s transpose this sentence a bit, and apply it to an industry that’s just like ours (the building industry, as discussed above), but a whole lot more mature (my replacements in brackets):
The bigger and more grandiose the set of rules you come up with [for building houses], the more severe the danger [of never getting the house built]. A few broad guidelines on a paint can begets thirty rules for painting, which begets a hundred detailed principles of painting..
Pretty soon you'll find yourself believing that every possible situation in [building a house] can be prescribed, if only you could come up with a sufficiently detailed set of [plans]! And, of course, a critical mass of [builders] patient enough to read Volumes I - XV of [the local building code]. You'll also want to set up a few [city building inspectors] for these [builders] to argue endlessly amongst themselves about [whether the builder built your house properly].
Properly Breaking The Rules
Don’t get me wrong here – I’m not a complete dork espousing that we need to walk in step to a set of software building codes. People break the rules when building houses all the time – but they do it from a perspective of understanding what it is they’re breaking. For example – one of the greatest architects of our time (Frank Lloyd Wright) loved to break rules and even have fun with the concept – even creating things with no right angles at all.
I love breaking the rules. I can feel Steve Harman sweat a little bit when I write code ahead of a test and I’m absolutely sure baby Alt.NET cries a little when I embed a SQL statement in my code (which yes, I just did the other day and I’m damn proud of it – kids dont’ do this at home, I had my reasons). The difference is that I KNOW the reasons why this is bad – and I also know why I did it in the first place. I was able to work through the issues and ultimately decided that breaking some principles would be just fine in my case (and no, I’m not going to tell you what it was that I did – but you’ll dig it when you do see it).
Summary
I don’t like being negative and I feel like that’s what this post is – so let’s see if we can turn that frown upside down if only because I like Jeff a whole lot and I feel like I’ve been picking on him of late (that last post was all in good fun I should point out) – and when my computer blows up I’ll need his help some day :). I do know what Jeff was after with his point and I’ll go so far as to defend him on this – that blindly following rules instead of your skills is actually a detriment. But your skillz gotta be good if you’re going to diss the Gang of Four and Uncle Bob! What Jeff might have wanted to say is:
LEARN THESE RULES FIRST AND USE THEM! Then you can decide if they don’t fit what you’re doing!
The people that made those principles up are quite smart, and have been doing this for a long, long time. Please don’t take Jeff’s post as the 3:00 school bell (where you run out to the parking lot and smoke cloves and drink wine coolers with your emo friends) – you’re *not* excused.
Posted
Wed, Feb 11 2009 4:15 PM
by
robconery