Spun

I’m the Wicked Witch of the West over on the todo.txt mailing list, smacking down feature request after feature request with “No” and “No” and “quite frankly, no.”

Today I said:

Software can only do so much. Ultimately you want a human at the wheel.

I should have worded it differently. Software can do everything. But you don’t want it to. Software should only do so much.

Being a yes-girl, it’s hard for me to say no to people’s earnest ideas, shared in the spirit of helping others. But Torvalds’ and other great open source developers’ genius was in their ability to pinpoint the good ideas and weed out the bad.

In short, good developers are good editors.

Mark and I did our first bi-coastal pair programming session last week with him in Brooklyn and me here in San Diego. I donned the headset, we called one another on the phone (yay free long distance), and with his Mac as a VNC server (using OS X VNC), I connected to his machine. For the most part he drove while we talked, read docs, coded and tested.

At first it was a little uncomfortable, because Mark felt like he was performing and I felt like a voyeur. I’ve trained myself to look away from people’s screens, so it was strange to watch him type and mouse legitimately. Once we got through the initial weirdness, though, it was one of the most productive co-coding sessions I’ve ever had. It’s amazing what two sets of eyes can do. And your frustration level never goes very high, either, because you have someone else joking about things. (Like when we couldn’t get our first unit test to succeed for the umpteenth time, he simply said, “Mark is angry,” which sent me into a fit of giggles.) Performance for the most part was good, except for switching between windows, which sometimes lagged as my viewer had to redraw things. Mark was also using Vonage to talk to me, so presumably that hogged up a bunch of his bandwidth.

This weekend, I drive and he uses the cell phone. Yay pair programming!

I’m building this thing with some buddies. My current responsibility is the prototype. This thing’s going to use some DHTML and AJAX, and I can envision the screens in my mind, all working in beautiful, usable form, a culmination of all the good interface techniques I’ve seen without all the ones that suck.

So I start to prototype, and I decide I want to totally wow my friends with a nearly-working front end. I’ve only got a few days, mind you - we’re working in 3-day dev cycles. And like an idiot, I wind up getting totally bogged down in writing and debugging Javascript for one little minor piece of functionality that we’ll probably throw out in the end anyway because this is a quick and dirty prototype. End result? Instead of a flashy, nearly-working proto, I had NOTHING to show for all my Javascript screwing around.

Lesson? There is no room for anal perfectionism in rapid prototyping.