Tuesday 08 November 2022 The Forest Road Reader, No 2.73 : The Next Twenty Minutes…​

In my previous couple of STinC++ installments, I’ve described some little feature that I’ve knocked up in a few minutes. In the articles, I’ve said five minutes. That might be a slight exaggeration, but not by much. The odd bank holiday aside, I work in STinC++ in tiny little episodes. I might have space to do a several development episodes one after another, but every one is complete in itself. In each of those few minutes, I want to go from working program to changed working program.

By changed, I mean changed for the better. Now, better is a somewhat vague and subjective term, but I’ll qualify better here as improved functionality or nicer code. I won’t give you both at the same time. It’s entirely possible I’ll bounce back and forth from one to the other over the course of an hour or two, but in each little development episode I try, I really try, to only be adding some new capability or improving the design.

Further, I want that change to be complete. I want it, as far a possible, to driven and supported by little unit tests. Obviously it’ll be checked into source code control and building clean.

And I really do want to do that in under twenty minutes at a time.

I’m not trying to tell you that I’m some kind of rampant code monster, spraying out hundreds of lines at time. Quite the opposite. If a five line change, if a one line change, will advance that the shape of the program, then that’s the change I’ll make. (A few weeks ago, my total output for the day was a single character.) I’m not interested in volume, I’m interested in the next useful change.

The less I can do at a time to make a change, the better I like it, the better I do it.