Sometimes You Need To Give Up

[alexander]

So less on a technical note, more of a thought. I always stride, especially when i am rewriting code, to make something better, this was the case when i rewrote this android app, twice, cutting the code in half each time and each time adding more functionality in the process, this is the case with anything i do. So about a year and a half ago, i wrote a proof of concept, which caught with management, and they handed it to someone else to figure out. Well a bit later, that person was gone, and the whole thing hit my eyes again, little did i know that i was going to find my exact POC code that i wrote up in about 5 hours to show that my idea is indeed a good one, noting in code and in life that it was nothing more then a POC, and that they should really structure and rewrite the whole thing before putting it to use.

 

Anyways, long story short, there was a good reason to rewrite the code, so i decided to experiment and try other ways of achieving the end result, namely using external service(s), in my case Google Docs. Well after about a day or so of playing around i came across an issue that i couldn't use a fairly large data-set with google docs, and after about another day, i had to give up the idea and go back to the original libraries and plan to get this project to move. Not everything was a loss, SecMysql was a major part of the design, anyways, I just wanted to say that sometimes you need to cut your losses and give up on an idea that is barely out of sight...

 

Now for another observation. I am surely not the only person who has had this happen to them, where their quick and dirty code ends up being blindly used. Now i ponder, is this why we have so much bad software today? Are we (the devs) lazy and don't want to rewrite code that we really should post POC stage? What can we do to change that?

[phillip1882]

Now for another observation. I am surely not the only person who has had this happen to them, where their quick and dirty code ends up being blindly used. Now i ponder, is this why we have so much bad software today? Are we (the devs) lazy and don't want to rewrite code that we really should post POC stage? What can we do to change that?

hmm, while my code has never been used thus, except for my own purposes, i can easily see how this would be a problem. my suggestion? if your writing code for work, write as stable code as possible even for POC. it doesn't need to be super functional, but should be able to handle errors and such without crashing.

[alexander]

Yeah that's pretty much the conclusion i came to as well, Phil. See i always thought that POC code was meant to be quick dirty and show a point you are trying to make, and then you rethink and rewrite it, but when you are dealing with other people you dont always seem to portray that point well enough for them to accept it as fact and do what is the correct thing. Though for my part i have to say that most of my dirty code is nicer then a lot of other code, at least from the slew of code that i read, some of my POC code is better then some of the production code i have seen (not just in our company).

[greenfin1]

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