Of Code Rewrites and the people who do them

Paul Tyma, previously the Chief Scientist at PreEmptive Solutions, now a Googler, is back to blogging after long. And his latest post reminded me just why I haven’t been able to remove his feed from my reader. The Feed Readers have changed, but the feeds still go on. And that’s just the way it is.

Paul mentions that your customers are the most honest people that you would ever find. In his own words, “They vote with their credit cards and their attention.” The success of our websites and applications comes only from their honest appreciation. It is not a refreshing new thought, but old wisdom, which needs to be said over and over again so that it stays fresh in our memory.

But what I actually wanted to talk about was code rewrites. Every developer always finds himself better than the last one, and better than they were two years back. So every two years, given a chance, they would rewrite all their codes with the latest hip language using the most state-of-the-art design and coding philosophies.

But they are usually wrong.

Huge organizations have made the mistake of believing that they could write a better software in six months time, and make it catch up with the old one in two years. But it can never be like that. Softwares like people, have lives. And with life comes experience. This experience is shared between the people who maintain the code, the people who run the hardware and the people who use the applications, and cannot be transfered to the new software.

We are born with our imperfections, and we have to learn to live with them. Sure, we can learn new tricks here and there, but we can never change completely. If we do, we would never be us again. And that’s just the way it is.

So Forget about changing the code and go read Paul’s Blog, it would be a much better way to spend your time.