Now, I have been working on week 8 of The Outreach Program for Women program with proposal to work on the index issue of MetaCPAN search. But my timeline a bit messed up now since the time block has been split into Bootstrap upgrading and fixing the broken as an effect from new Bootstrap.
I’m supposed to work on the new things but I cannot since I have to complete the current pull requests with fixing and cleaning a mess I made.
For me, I think this is some kind of classic problems in software development life cycle — it’s hard to make the code perfect in the first solution especially when you lack of experience. Even that’s the best solution in that moment but may not last long. It still need be maintained, fixed and improved like an endless development.
For me the difficult thing to be a programmer is when you have to ‘estimate' when the job will be done but the more difficult thing seems to be make it 'completely done' in the time you have estimated. We will never know whether the job is difficult or not until we work on that which I think it’s a challenge of programmer job that people like.
However, we did estimate and we are overdue sounds better than no estimation and no goal. Then we could learn about our performance and speed in each job.
You're absolutely right, these are the same problems that every developer faces everywhere:
ReplyDelete* We try to make the code future-proof, but it always needs to be maintained as things change.
* Estimation is very difficult because you never know how much trouble one aspect of the job will be until you get caught in the middle of it.
* It's often hard to consider the project complete because there's always one more bug that gets identified or one more feature somebody wants ;-)
I agree with your closing comment as well: Making a guess and then getting to work on it is probably better than no goal and no idea how long it took to get you there. The biggest thing is to just get started, and then to get it out there when it's "good enough" (if you wait for perfection it will never be done).
Great post.