Koodihommia

Of all the horrific code I have written, by far, the most harmful and destructive have involved too early abstraction. Everyone knows the issues stemming from the wrong abstraction. Even copy-paste code would have been a better choice than creating some seemingly fancy, say, adapter pattern implementation. To be honest, I think copy-paste has a worse reputation than it should. A given project might have started with best practices, module structure, libraries of a prior project/16k star primer. That can be good! Some best practices naturally transcend projects. We should bring in the lessons learned but the timing matters. Upon a closer look, the project might indeed have agreeable abstractions. Still, those could be hollow and bring only extra LOCs and solve the issues faced in the previous projects, which have never occurred in the current one. Upon recently starting two soon-to-be large projects, I learned to leave some wisdom from previous lives behind. While deep in the coding zen...

Back in the day, everyone was using Winamp. It is a music player with the user interface of a mixing console. The bloody thing had an equalizer on the front page! As an amateur music producer, I know that EQ is a powerful tool but making changes that sound good is difficult, to say the least. Mixing engineers spend considerable effort with the artist to balance the frequency ranges to arrive at the desired musical outcome. I bet the 15-year-old me butchered a lot of songs with the thing. Now we are using Spotify, a player with basically a search bar and a play button. I ran into something called Ousterhout's Law on the  Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces book . Here is a quote from the book TIP: AVOID VOO-DOO CONSTANTS (OUSTERHOUT’S LAW) Avoiding voo-doo constants is a good idea whenever possible. Unfortunately, as in the example above, it is often difficult. One could try to make the system learn a good value, but that too is not straightforward. The frequent result: a configura...