{"id":14,"date":"2012-02-13T06:56:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T06:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/three-simple-rules-for-geeks"},"modified":"2014-05-31T06:42:45","modified_gmt":"2014-05-31T06:42:45","slug":"three-simple-rules-for-geeks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/?p=14","title":{"rendered":"three simple rules for geeks"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK… I’ve been around for a while and coding for a long time.\u00a0 Here are my top 3 rules which I repeat over and over and over:<\/p>\n

What problem are you solving?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Not rocket science.\u00a0 But surprising if you ask that question how often people don’t have an answer.\u00a0 If I don’t know what problem I’m solving, I’m basically screwed.\u00a0 (Note: this can, and does often happen at the corporate level).<\/p>\n

\"Images-1\"<\/div>\n

Make it Work, Make it Right, Make it Fast<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don’t know who came up with that (Rob or me), but that’s been my coding mantra for the last 20 or so years.\u00a0 There’s no other sentence that I can repeat to myself that has the impact that has.\u00a0 Because I’m A-D-D, and human, I can spend days doing what Sid-the-sailor called “painting the windowsills” – I may have an entire house in dire need of attention, but I can, and do, become obsessively focused on stupid things.<\/p>\n

Make it Work.<\/strong>\u00a0 Tim Gunn<\/a> stole that part, but no matter what I’m doing, if it doesn’t work, Nothing Else Matters.\u00a0 Until it works, don’t do anything else.<\/p>\n

Make it Right.<\/strong>\u00a0 Debug it.\u00a0 Fix whatever.<\/p>\n

Make it Fast\/Pretty.<\/strong>\u00a0 In the old days, ‘fast’ was important.\u00a0 These days, I suppose ‘pretty’ takes its place. And a lot of the time, this is the fun part.<\/p>\n

If you create a Giant Pile of Shit, put a flag in it and claim it as yours.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Guy Martin, my boss, circa 1987.\u00a0 I was working with very expensive SCSI disks, making 4 disks look like one big disk.\u00a0 These disks were expensive; like $7500 a pop expensive.\u00a0 I plugged the power supply in backwards.\u00a0 I saw a small puff of smoke.\u00a0 I brought it into Guy and said ‘defecive disk’.\u00a0 He wasn’t buying it (probably because of either the smell, or the look on my face).<\/p>\n

Sean, “When you create a giant pile of shit, put a flag in that pile of shit, be proud of it, and claim it as yours!”\u00a0 This technique taught me to admit that I make mistakes (and be proud!)… which is always<\/strong> better than trying to hide it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK… I’ve been around for a while and coding for a long time. Here are my top 3 rules which I repeat over and over and over: What problem are you solving? Not rocket science. But surprising if you ask that question how often people don’t have an …<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[17,18,21,28],"class_list":["post-14","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-makeitwork","tag-mantra","tag-mistakes","tag-simplerules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":265,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14\/revisions\/265"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.maclawran.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}