I was clean for 4 months, off the Java. In London the only beans I worked with were warm and always came out on toast. Believe me when I tell you 'I didn't miss it at all.' But that's how it is when you can get away from that bad crowd you are hanging with. It's like Danny Zucko from Grease during that summer with Olivia Newton John. You feel like a better person, but eventually you have to come back and face your past.
So now I'm back, and up to my old tricks. It happened so fast. They come at you with some tough problem and you're not sure what to do. Then that old familiar feeling, pressure, takes hold. The devil on your shoulder is saying "C'mon man, get your blade out and cut it. It's us or them. Man, just do it! It's us or them!" And before you know it you've done it. You just cut and pasted code from one place to another. You do things even though you know they are wrong because you are scared and don't know what else to do. Who do you turn to? Yep, big projects for money corrupt even the most principled of developers.
So here I am rationalizing my behavior, casting blame again. It is depressing, but all is not lost. Time out from the situation has brought some perspective. It isn't such a helpful perspective, but perhaps it is a way out of the cycle. A glimpse of what could be.
One thing my hiatus revealed to me about the code for money equation was this: People are always trying to get rid of the code. There is a software industry conspiracy. Code doesn't sell, products and promises with warm and fuzzy service agreements sell, so the industry covers it up. Hides it away. They have given it a bad name. How? They paper over it with that popular wysiwyg patterned wallpaper. They light the fuse on their UML and blast their way down through layer upon layer of solid interface. They carefully calculate coordinates before launching it out of a n-tiered middleware content management server. Or they just encase it in solid XML and push it off a bridge over the Mississippi.
The truth is, all the shell games and sleight of hand are a waste. If there is one thing that is certain, the code isn't going anywhere. You can't hide code without code, but what does that give us? MORE CODE! The way forward is to say goodbye to those bloated frameworks. Lighten your load and get back to writing code. The kind that is SUPPOSED to be there. The kind that MUST exist. Nothing more, nothing less. Stop smoking filter cigarettes. Stop drinking light beer. Eat unpasteurized cheese, drink non-diet cola, dust off your text editor and write some code.
Now I don't mean you should go back to assembler or Cobol, and you don't have to ditch your dueling dual core processors in favor of a TRS-80 with Floating Basic. Nope, all I'm saying is that it is time to stop hiding. Unlock the doors. Come out of your bunker and disarm the nuclear warheads. You might be surprised to find how little of the code it takes to solve your problem. And once you have it there in plain text, that human sized, understandable, useful, beautiful little something you can relate to, people will see that it isn't so bad after all. The code, I mean. Now go buy a second hand linux box and some black pocket T-shirts and see the world!
Links to get you started!!!
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