Blogging Pubbitch

Portakabins are wonderful things. Temporary buildings that are designed to fill a certain need, but only for a well defined period. They are also terrible things: they're "good enough" to the point where people sometimes use for far too long, despite the fact that as permanent accommodation a properly designed building is far better.

Of course, there's a software development analogy in here. Teams often throw in a temporary fix to a problem that's "good enough" for now. Life would be a lot more pleasant if the job was done properly, but perhaps the team is bridging to a new architecture, or time pressures mean that as long as "this code-path here" works fine then it's okay.

The problems start when that portakabin is never removed --- who has time to go back and clean up things that are working? Someone comes along, looks at this thing that was created as temporary hack and decides that, actually, yes, that is how code should be written. Oh! The pain of Example Driven Development! Suddenly, what should have been a quick fix turns out to be how things are done.

Perhaps this explains my visceral dislike of seeing temporary hacks being thrown into a code base; we're just saving up long term pain at the cost of doing something we're not happy with today. Reminds of the saying "Of course a shortcut takes more effort. If it didn't it wouldn't be a shortcut, it would The Way"