Too scared to write a line of code

Ironically, I think this is something that affects seasoned programmers more than new ones; the more you know about the trade, the more voices you have saying "no, that's wrong! Don't do that!", which can freeze progress. The way I combat it is by writing down pseudocode in my source code - literally just english, non-compiling pseudocode - which I then "refactor" into working code (thus the first "green" is "it parses"). By making step 0 the expression of the idea rather "writing the fist line of code", I can get right into the process rather than getting hung up on the "how".

Instead, I would sculpt the entire piece of art roughly, almost unrecognizably, and then target large parts of the sculpture. Details like ears and eyes might even never get done, depending on how the requirements change for the sculpture.

I always approach writing software the same way, so the first iteration is just a hardcoded piece of software that just shows me that it will actually work, and then I iterate and start smoothing out all of the sharp edges, of which there are a ton.

"Just do it" is the best advice for stuck people - you tell them to just start doing the thing, not worry about details, and eventually you'll do it right. This is good advice for a business guy who's pin-wheeling ideas in his head, a programmer with no product sense, or anyone else who wants but does not make.

When you know a little bit about what you want to build, and maybe even a bit about _how_ to build it - when you have some actual experience, skill, and will - then the right advice is typically to slow down and think it through.

Doing some nominal TDD has helped quite a bit for me, because it does require writing code, but not code that I have to worry too much about (and if it happens to be a pretty shitty, shortsighted test, I can delete it without it, theoretically, hampering the app) screwing me over. Sometimes this physical act is enough to get me past the code-writing block.

Also, if I actually do the testing right, it prevents regression, improves code quality, etc. etc.

"Plan to throw one away. You will anyway."

The mistake most people make is that they mix learning and doing in a single round. It's much better to write a prototype with a specific goal of wringing as much knowledge from it as you can without being distracted by scalability or maintainability minutiae. Then, and only then, will you be ready to write The Real Thing with all of the bells and whistles. In the end you'll probably save more time than if you kept going back and forth waterfall-style between learning and doing on the same codebase. You'll certainly end up with a better result.

P.S. That quote is from 1975. To quote another great mind (Santayana): those who do not know...

http://techcrunch.com/2007/08/11/facebook-source-code-leaked...

I've heard many arguments where people will tell you, it won't scale. Or you're doing it all wrong by writing quick and dirty procedural code. Quite frankly scaling is about the nicest problem to have if you're a startup. Without traction your ugly code simply isn't going to matter. With traction you will gain funding and the ugly code problem quickly disappears like I assume it did at Facebook.

But of course, before starting any major project, the first thing any developer should do is map out at least a basic mental design of the program - even if that map isn't written in pseudo-code or in a form of a flow chart.

I'm probably remembering things with rose-tinted glasses.

These days, even in open source -- the once proud land of eccentric hackers and the can-do spirit, there is such a negative focus on bad developers. I can certainly see how the OP could feel paralyzed when just trying to write a line of code.

In reality we're all at different points in our journey and have had different experiences along the way. There's always room to improve ourselves and it's important to listen to criticism so that we know where to start. But sometimes you just need to cut loose and let it all hang out. I started writing a library I call "Horton," for this very purpose: whimsy, pleasure, and most of all to avoid the engineer mindset!

In order gain insights and develop new ideas you have to find new hunches and investigate them. It's hard to develop hunches in a vacuum where your reality doesn't expand beyond your own self-made bubble. You've got to push once in a while... and people out there who complain so loudly about shitty developers? Get a life and help someone out. We're just making programs.

update: https://github.com/agentultra/Horton forgot the link...

I've certainly experienced this with some of the people I worked with recently. Anything you win in the short term gets lost several weeks--if not days--later when everything is a horrible mess. Don't even think about coming back to that code months later!

I've found that putting in a little bit of care for the future pays off even in the short term. Perhaps not on the scale of hours or days, but definitely weeks. Which is still pretty immediate.

However, how you do this is also very important. The handy rule I've been using is simple: simplicity. Improve your code by making it do less not more. If you can make code more maitainable or general by simplifying, do it. If it would require adding new concepts or mental overhead, reconsider. Try to reuse existing abstractions as much as possible.

This usually--but not always--means making your code more functional. Do you really need to write this operation in place? Do you really need to tie everything together with a bunch of implicit state changes? Probably not! This is not to say that you should never use state: just be sure to only use it when it fits well and makes sense. And be explicit about it.

The functional style (at least in languages like Haskell) also lends itself very well to reusing simple and general abstractions. The key idea here is that these abstractions are not about doing more: they're about doing less. More general code simply leaves you less room to make mistakes. If you're working with lists of numbers, there are all sorts of arithmetic mistakes you can make; if you manage to write the same code against lists of anything, the only mistakes possible will be in list handling.

Haskell just makes this more practical by providing abstractions with a great "power-to-weight ratio": ones that manage to be simple, general and yet still expressive. Code with functors or monoids or traversables is easier to write than more concrete code and yet still flexible enough for many useful tasks. As a bonus, it's also more reusable. For free.

So the key idea is reduction: all these abstractions work by stripping concrete types of power. A functor can do much less than a list. A monoid can do much less than a number. This lets you write nicer code without becoming an "architecture astronaut" because instead of adding structure, you're really taking it away.

I've found that programming like this really helps in maintaining and extending the code later on. But it doesn't slow me down when I'm writing either--I actually save time because I spend less getting time getting the code correct in the first place.

These days, I've started being able to make large changes or add complicated features and have them work on the first try. Not every time, but surprisingly often. Certainly much more often than before! In large part, I think this is because of writing the code with an eye towards simplicity.

So the important insight: take the simple route, not the easy route.

But, if you know better, do better please.

After writing tons of code, I've come to realize that 80% of the time, it takes about the same time to do it "right" (scalable/secure/modular) as it does to do it "OK".

Ex: Are plaintext passwords any faster to build/code than encrypted+salt passwords? Nope.

And, it's fine to intend to refactor later. But, too many organizations have no tolerance later to let engineers do things that don't have visible results. I've suffered through a stint of handling "legacy code" like that & it was painful & demoralizing.

In part, this is simply to get past the analysis paralysis or creative block and get going on something. But also because it can sometimes be easier to make something good when you have a clear bad example in front of you to contrast it with.

Occasionally, I find myself “stuck” when writing code – the coder’s “writer’s block” I guess. This quote by Ward Cunningham is both inspiring and truthful:

-- Once we had written it, we could look at it. And we’d say, “Oh yeah, now we know what’s going on,” because the mere act of writing it organized our thoughts. Maybe it worked. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe we had to code some more. But we had been blocked from making progress, and now we weren’t. We had been thinking about too much at once, trying to achieve too complicated a goal, trying to code it too well. Maybe we had been trying to impress our friends with our knowledge of computer science, whatever. But we decided to try whatever is most simple: to write an if statement, return a constant, use a linear search. We would just write it and see it work. We knew that once it worked, we’d be in a better position to think of what we really wanted. --

Next time you’re stuck, just write the simplest thing that could possibly work!

-- So when I asked, “What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work,” I wasn’t even sure. I wasn’t asking, “What do you know would work?” I was asking, “What’s possible? What is the simplest thing we could say in code, so that we’ll be talking about something that’s on the screen, instead of something that’s ill-formed in our mind.” I was saying, “Once we get something on the screen, we can look at it. If it needs to be more we can make it more. Our problem is we’ve got nothing.” --

Source: http://www.artima.com/intv/simplest.html

Before you start writing, sit down with a friend in a bar and explain to him exactly what you're trying to say and do. If you can't communicate your idea in a concise, conversational way, then you're not ready to start writing.

Applied to code, I suppose this is similar to the concept of Rubber Ducky Debugging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

if your team builds apps with 500k LOC, you need to be constantly focused on abstracting and factoring out patterns or you will drown in your defect rate before the project even ships. If your team builds medical device software, if you aren't doing this, you'll get someone killed.

If you're building a personal blog, your time is better spent by pasting jquery snippets.

There is a spectrum here and most projects fall somewhere in between.

"And all that is fantastically interesting, but completely beside the point. I just fell into the classic programmer trap of exploring and learning about (what I find) fantastically interesting things that will address all sorts of amazingly complex situations, but which the learning of said things resulted in absolutely nothing of tangible value being created."

http://www.jamiebriant.com/blog/2013/1/fireworks.html

1. Let me think about this some more before giving you an answer.

2. I will use my debugger.

3. I will create a new branch for this task.

4. I have commented my code and commented it well.

5. I have accounted for fail scenarios.

6. I have considered multiple solutions to this task.

7. I have not begun hacking away immediately at a task.

8. I have attempted exploiting my code.

1. Write code fast.

2. Refactor when necessary (either because you got to a dead end and can't keep writing code fast anymore, or because you're done and want to move on to another task).

3. Goto 1.

I am now working at a startup where the early devs have left. They did precisely what was needed at that point - build quickly, ensure it works for the 3/4 customers we had back then and document it as well. Fast forward a year later, that same code is no longer extensible for many clients. Its rigid and tightly coupled and rewriting some parts means, we have to pretty much rewrite a whole lot more than we bargained for. We will have to burn through a lot of cash to just build a whole new product based on some of the scalability and maintenance learning we now have from a year of learning and growing to client# 100.

The point is, there is always going to be "this is the right thing right now, its what our customers want" and then something else for the future.

I have seen that people who have worked for a while and in many startups do the smart thing (as expected) and while follow "build for now" they also do the sensible thing of investing for the future (from experience).

I would still go one step further and at least apply the strategy pattern/polymorphism when you have a large if/else/case block going beyond 2 or 3 conditions in a controller or model or something. (assuming MVC web apps)

The fact is you can write out some ugly code directly in a controller where it might get some code working fast and prevent the freeze up of your output, but once working you should immediately move it to the appropriate place like a model or library, and apply a basic OO strategy pattern (perhaps not with factory/interfaces etc until needed later) where appropriate to cut down on spaghetti/nested conditionals.

This really does not take much more time than stopping at working code that is ugly, and is a good middle ground where it is not painful to return to later.

There is still no good excuse for "taking a dump in the corner" of your code base just to get a marginal gain in output.

As such, when I'm not under those constraints, I sometimes go a little overboard factoring out duplicated code and looking for the beautiful solution. To me, beauty is the maximization of clarity and conciseness. Since I'm usually writing Perl, there's quite a lot to work with in that regard.

For example, yesterday I spent 4-6 hours writing approximately 40 lines of Perl (along with another 40 lines of tests).

On the plus side, what I generate during these binges is generally an efficiency multiplier for the other code I write, as well as a god way to really examine some of the more esoteric, but useful, ways to use your chosen language.

Last week, after getting to the first page on Google's search results, I'm getting about 12,000 hits a week. Monitoring shows my daily CPU usage is nearly 0%, and memory usage around 32MB. Today(3 months later) I finally did some SEO, added compression, caching, and a CDN to get drop page load time from ~2 seconds to under 500ms.

[1] https://medium.com/look-what-i-made/5d808ce36277

The thing is if you don't do it right with first go you will have hard time to get it done later. What management cares if it works, it's your responsibility to make it right from the start and they probably won't give you time to make some refactoring/optimizations later, because time is money :(. Sometimes it's hard to explain consequences. I have seen this too many times.

I believe you need to find golden middle, by not trying to hack things to much or overengineering problem, though sometimes is hard to define where is this middle.

  A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved
  from a simple system that worked.

I often share a similar sentiment with teams I work with: Don't throw solutions at undefined problems.

That commonly applies to performance and premature optimization.

I'll agree that there needs to be some thought as to what's being built before, and while, doing so, but spending time resolving as-of-yet-undefined problems means decision making based on high levels of uncertainty.

Get something working and let problems define themselves. Often times, they do so in a way that makes them easier to fix vs. relying on the speculative solution making I mentioned above.

If I find myself getting stuck in the cycle of "this can be written better, I'll just spend 2 hours improving it rather than finishing the framework" I stop, I think about it, then I leave the working-but-probably-crap code in place and move on.

Once the framework is in place, then I start making things better, one area at a time.

That said, don't dither too much over writing code. History favours the doers rather than the vacillators. Most software except for utilities has a quite short working life anyway. There is also the standard advice of "expect to throw one away".

So I completely agree on the underlying principle: Dont to _anything_ prematurely, and that first and foremost includes actually writing any code at all.

Thinking about this stuff is the sign of either a newbie or lacking up-front design.

Does that resonate enough for you?

Seriously, seeing stuff black&white is how bad code happens. (And so many other things in life.)

Also, test your app with LOTS of data. Even during early development. A slow algorithm/query will become very obvious under a high load.

They prey on the insecurity of the smartest people. It makes us easy to take advantage of, and compromises almost all of our leverage.

Every time you let them sit in your head and natter about how your work isn't good enough because it doesn't isn't in accord with what they see as "professional", you're letting them win. The problem with assholes is that their imprints live on even years after you get away from them. It takes conscious effort to get that lingering cognitive load out of your mind.

We need to step back and simplify: solve problems, and do it well. (This includes documentation and testing, when appropriate.) Make stuff, make it good, make what's good better. We need to get back to that, rather than slugging it out over "agile" and TDD and nonsense. Zed Shaw got it right: http://programming-motherfucker.com/