Little development time vs perfect code?

5 points by symbion 13 years ago | 6 comments

I am sure I am not the only one to have this "issue".

I have created some small libraries for my side projects (mainly C++ lately) but I keep spending an awful lot amount of time trying to make it look good and take into account all corner cases while I should probably just be hacking away to get something working (i.e some kind of prototype).

How do you guys deal that ?

tzaman 13 years ago |

Hack away to get something working putting those libraries to good use. Code will be optimized throughout the process.

symbion 13 years ago | |

You are right. Code optimisation should be a process rather than a task in itself.

lumberjack 13 years ago |

I use a priority list for each project. A working implementation would be a high priority. Security bugs too. Optimizing code a bit lower and so on and so forth.

symbion 13 years ago | |

Priority list ? Good idea. I have a JIRA instance for my project with all tasks though none of them are prioritised. It might seems slightly overkill but I guess I could use it to prioritise task/issues with it.

PS: Lumberjack ? Are you the one who wrote the Cocoa Lumberjac logging API by any chance ?

orjan 13 years ago | | |

If you already have the tasks, prioritizing them should be fairly easy. Then just scan down the list until you find the first non-essential feature and there you draw the line. Anything after that goes into version two.

lumberjack 13 years ago | | |

> PS: Lumberjack ? Are you the one who wrote the Cocoa Lumberjac logging API by any chance ?

Nope, though I wish I could say I did.