Code as Mind Altering Experience
Sascha Becker Shine (check out an interesting resume) works for Laszlo Systems, and also writes a (personal) ShinyBlog. On Friday, November 25, 2005, Sascha wrote:
[tease] (emphasis added)
It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving and I have three days to do whatever I want! I want to code. The question is, what should I code? I could dive into a fairly bad set of Laszlo Mail bugs; I’ve got seven P1’s blocking the next milestone. I could learn Ruby on Rails, although I don’t have a project I want to implement with it, so let’s rule that out. I could return to my Delicious Library Laszlo application. I could look at some OpenLaszlo platform issues. I could work on a book chapter I’ve committed to writing for an early January deadline. I could go back to my skunkworks project that will dramatically improve Laszlo Mail usability.
How to choose? I want to do something that will be fun to do and that will give me that happy coding feeling. (Code is my favorite mood-altering experience, in case that wasn’t clear already.) The P1 bugs and platform performance issues sort of fill me with dread. The skunkworks usability project, though, that’s exciting. When I demonstrated a prototype a few weeks ago, people were really excited about it.
Probably traditional software engineering values would say, quality before features, contractually-required features before strategic features before just cool features… but I say, bah! It’s my three days, and I know I’ll be spending the rest of November and December on quality and contractually required features. So, I’m going to dive into the fun usability project, and get back to the bugs Saturday or Sunday.
If your brain works anything like mine, you want to hire ten Sachas. It doesn’t get any better than this.