Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Spec First, Then Code

"Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file." -- Louis Srygley

If you don't know what you're trying to solve, you don't know what to code.

A lot of times we have this feeling of "let me jump straight to the code". But without understanding what problem you're trying to solve, you'd end up writing a bunch of things that doesn't solve anything -- or, at least, anything that should be solved.

So here is the point: Try to get a small spec on whatever you want to solve. But be aware that even that spec may have to be thrown out, as the understanding of the problem tend to grow as long as the project continue.

Yes, it's paradoxical: You need a spec to know what to code to avoid coding the wrong solution, but the spec may be wrong, so you end up solving the wrong solution anyway. So what's the point? The point is, the spec reflects the understanding of a problem at a certain point: All you (and your team) know is there.

The times I stood longer looking at my own code wondering what to do next were when we didn't have the next step defined: It was missing some point of the solution or we didn't have the communication structures defined or something of sorts. Usually, when that happened, I stumbled upon Twitter or Mastodon instead of trying to solve the problem. So when you see yourself doing this kind of stuff -- "I don't know what to do next, and I'm not sure if I'm done with the current problem" -- then maybe it's time to stop and talk to other people in the project to figure that out.

Another way to think this: Erik Deitrich have a post about Don’t Learn to Code — Learn to Automate, something I can get behind 'cause most of us, when doing stuff, think "I need to do this, then I pick that thingy and put it there and from there I do this other work". Basically, we create mental models of specs, step by step, on what we need to do. And, from there, it may be even simpler, 'cause now all you need to learn is "First, how I do this; Ok, got it, now I get the result from this and put there" and so on. You can even have a learning path, if you're a beginner.