Every so often I realize that the once small and tidy codebase that I was building has grown all out of proportion. Somehow, while I wasn’t paying attention, it morphed from a little canoe to a giant battleship.<\/p>\n
This is fine in its own way — you can get a lot of power from a sophisticated tool set. But like any Frankenstein’s monster, it starts to take on a life of its own.<\/p>\n
After a codebase gets to beyond a certain size, it has a definite tendency to want to do some things more than others. And it’s very difficult to steer it away from that tendency, because you are no longer steering a little boat — you are steering a giant ship.<\/p>\n
And so, every once in a while, when I want to explore something really different, I begin afresh. I don’t throw out the old Frankenstein creature, but I let it rest for a while, and start a little side project.<\/p>\n
That little side project can’t do everything, but it can do some particular thing that I am interested in with only a very small amount of code. Which means that it is very easy to steer.<\/p>\n
Sometimes you need to get away from your own edifice complex. Take off that captain’s hat, find yourself a nice quiet stream, and paddle a little canoe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every so often I realize that the once small and tidy codebase that I was building has grown all out of proportion. Somehow, while I wasn’t paying attention, it morphed from a little canoe to a giant battleship. This is fine in its own way — you can get a lot of power from a … Continue reading “Edifice complex”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27769"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27769"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27769\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27770,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27769\/revisions\/27770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}