There’s been a lot of discussion of clean code over the last few weeks in mailing lists and blogs that I read: see e.g. this post by Ron Jeffries. Which set up an interesting resonance with this paragraph that I ran across today in David Allen’s latest GTD book:
Can you be too organized? Not in the pristine sense of how I define the word. If things aren’t where they should be, and accessible as you need them, you’re simply not organized enough. If you have created structural systems that are unduly complicated and that cause you to have difficulty in accessing what’s required, when it’s required, you are also disorganized. (Making It All Work, p. 133.)
Post Revisions:
- April 17, 2009 @ 19:35:03 [Current Revision] by David Carlton
- February 20, 2009 @ 20:59:07 by David Carlton
Posts
Thanks for linking to Ron Jeffries’ blog. Somehow with all the agile reading I’ve done I’ve managed to miss his blog. But now that I look at it, I see that he has a lot of gems there.
Interesting quote from David Allen as well. To me it means that “being organized” isn’t following all the rules about what to do to be organized, but rather it means organizing things in such way as to be most effective. If you’re not effective, you’re not organized, regardless of how many of the rules you follow.
Similarly (though I don’t think he made that point explicitly) Jeffries’ article claims that code improvement is never costly; therefore, if a change you’re making is too costly, it’s not an improvement!
2/22/2009 @ 12:00 pm