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Quantity Always Trumps Quality - Short But True Blog Post

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mouser:
Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror hasn't been putting out his best work on the Coding Horror blog lately, probably because he's focused on his new Stack Overflow project which will have its grand opening soon, and today's post isn't really saying anything new, BUT it is saying something that everyone needs to hear about the central importance of just being productive..

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

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http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001160.html

Deozaan:
Nice article. Especially if you read the 3 other articles listed.

f0dder:
Haven't looked into the three linked articles, so I can only comment on the main idea... I do agree you shouldn't be over-thinking solutions, but "Stop theorizing." (that sentence standing alone) can be dangerously misleading. Most projects do need some theorizing/thinking-through before you start mindlessly churning out code. Otherwise it's way too easy to code yourself into a corner where you have to do massive re-factoring (or starting from scratch).

Sure, that can be a valuable learning experience as well, and not too bad for small hobbyist projects. But a little thinking and planning and specification goes a long way if you want to work on anything larger than tiny-size :)

cranioscopical:
Most projects do need some theorizing/thinking-through before you start mindlessly churning out code. Otherwise it's way too easy to code yourself into a corner where you have to do massive re-factoring
-f0dder (August 03, 2008, 03:02 PM)
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The voice of reason!   :Thmbsup:

Stoic Joker:
Having worked on several database oriented projects, I gota go with f0dder on this ... GumBalling code together is a total catastrophy.

Sure there is a break point where you need to just bite the bullet and try something ... but think it through first.

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