Tales of Efficiency

Jul 6, 2022

The alarm goes off in the morning, and as usual, I begin my day by putting on my clothes. Now, I’ve been putting on my clothes for a long time, and I like to do things efficiently, so I put my clothes on in the following order:

  1. Shoes
  2. Socks
  3. Underwear
  4. Hat
  5. Shirt
  6. Pants

Then I head to the bathroom, where I take care of my hygiene with similar attention to detail:

  1. Floss
  2. Shower
  3. Use the Toilet
  4. Brush
  5. Wash my face

I could go on, but by now, I’m starting to realize that I’m running late to begin programming for the day. So I hurry to get my coffee, get to my computer, and work.

Unfortunately, I have to deal with another one of these coaches or consultants who is trying to tell me that we could improve the way we build software and have higher quality and speed simultaneously.

I wish they’d get over it and realize that I’ve spent a lot of time curating the approach I take to coding like I do in the entirety of my life, and what they’re saying is totally impractical and could never work.

But I suppose for the sake of completeness, I’ll write down the steps that I’ve honed to a sharp edge over the years:

  1. Seek requirements
  2. Design
  3. Code
  4. Code Review
  5. Test
  6. Push to Production

Now, this joker is saying that testing at the end is why we have so many problems and why we’re so slow and wants us to test first. That is ridiculous! They also said that if we worked together in pairs, we could get rid of reviews. How inefficient is that! Two people writing one set of code is stupid. There is no way that one person just watching can make that much of a difference.

Code reviews do take a while, though, sometimes a week.

Well, I have to stop writing for now. There’s another production outage, and it looks like I have another day of bug fixes and trying to get this tech debt prioritized.