Book Image

Understanding Software

By : Max Kanat-Alexander
Book Image

Understanding Software

By: Max Kanat-Alexander

Overview of this book

In Understanding Software, Max Kanat-Alexander, Technical Lead for Code Health at Google, shows you how to bring simplicity back to computer programming. Max explains to you why programmers suck, and how to suck less as a programmer. There’s just too much complex stuff in the world. Complex stuff can’t be used, and it breaks too easily. Complexity is stupid. Simplicity is smart. Understanding Software covers many areas of programming, from how to write simple code to profound insights into programming, and then how to suck less at what you do! You'll discover the problems with software complexity, the root of its causes, and how to use simplicity to create great software. You'll examine debugging like you've never done before, and how to get a handle on being happy while working in teams. Max brings a selection of carefully crafted essays, thoughts, and advice about working and succeeding in the software industry, from his legendary blog Code Simplicity. Max has crafted forty-three essays which have the power to help you avoid complexity and embrace simplicity, so you can be a happier and more successful developer. Max's technical knowledge, insight, and kindness, has earned him code guru status, and his ideas will inspire you and help refresh your approach to the challenges of being a developer.
Table of Contents (50 chapters)
Understanding Software
Credits
About the Author
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Foreword
2
The Engineer Attitude
3
The Singular Secret of the Rockstar Programmer
4
Software Design, in Two Sentences
5
Clues to Complexity
6
Ways To Create Complexity: Break Your API
7
When Is Backwards-Compatibility Not Worth It?
8
Complexity is a Prison
10
The Accuracy of Future Predictions
11
Simplicity and Strictness
12
Two is Too Many
14
What is a Bug?
24
What is a Computer?
25
The Components of Software: Structure, Action, and Results
27
Software as Knowledge
30
Simplicity and Security
34
How We Figured Out What Sucked
36
Why Programmers Suck
38
Developer Hubris
39
"Consistency" Does Not Mean "Uniformity"
42
Success Comes from Execution, Not Innovation
Index

Refactoring Doesn't Waste Time, It Saves It


And that brings us to another point – even though you might think that it's going to take more time to refactor and then develop your feature, in my experience it usually takes less time or the same amount of time overall. "Overall" here includes all the time that you would spend debugging, rolling back releases, sending out bug fixes, writing tests for complex systems, etc.

It might seem faster to write a feature in your complex system without refactoring, and sometimes it is, but most of the time you'll spend less time overall if you do a good job of putting the system in order first before you start adding new feature. This isn't just theoretical – I've demonstrated it to be the case many times.

I've actually had my team finish projects faster than teams who were working on newer codebases with better tools when we did this. (That is, the other team should have been able to out-develop us, but we refactored continuously in the service of the product...