Ah... the Metaphysics of Quality...
And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good, Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
- Robert M. Pirsig
Chad Renando wrote:
When I worked in a Printed Circuit Board manufacturing company, the Quality Manager and I had this discussion about the definition of "quality". We could put in hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and controls to ensure the circuit boards were within near perfect tolerance. But the guy wanting a simple punch-and-crunch circuit board could care less.
Bottom line, the quality of your code depends on the application. Your code is your calling card, be it for your personal resume or your
company's portfolio. If the employer you are after or the clients you
are targeting don't care, then punch-and-crunch code is just fine. It's all about defining the Objectives and the Audience.
For me, I am grateful for these discussions, as they help define this moving standard of quality as it pertains to the at-times esoteric term of "best practice".
Chad who finds his definition of "quality" depends on if he can be bothered applying himself that day
On 5/14/05, Tom Kerr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Sat, May 14, 2005 at 10:10:13AM +1000, Chad Renando wrote:
It does seem as though adherance to one line of thought or another fits within religious ideals. Personally, I consider the adherance to CSS to fall in the religions of:
"Expansion of Seperation", where after you seperate into MVC, you seperate your View into Style and Content.
and
"Weight Reduction" the zealous reduction of the amount of code required for a given functionlaity
At the moment, with regards to the faiths of "best practice", I am a pagan like Sagan, ascribing to the religion of:
"Get It Out" where you pump out good functionality with crap code and pray daily that you'll know what you were thinking when it comes time to rebuild
Chad
~snip~
This brings up an interesting (to me, anyway) question. I guess to my mind that the seperation is "what is correct" versus "what I know will work". With respect to the CSS-P/Tables question, it's no secret that your table-based design, so long as it works in only a couple of browsers will be viewable by >95% of the viewing public, complete with all of the nice graphical features that the author intended.
Similarly, for the end user, the back-end code that you write is entirely unimportant so long as it, within reasonable time, spits out some display information (be it HTML/Flash/SVG/whatever) that lets them see what they want to see.
Personally I cringe when the word from on high is that something needs to be finished yesterday, and the easiest way to make it work -right now- is to make a page rely on a user having javascript, or cookies. I cringe when I think of the poor maintainer who has to work out why on earth I stored a comma seperated list in a database table instead of splitting it into several fields allowing them to use SQL selection criteria in their search. Yet the client/non-technical boss/accounting department are chuffed when it 'just works'.
In my own way I'm a pagan of sorts, I do much of my home web browsing in a text-only browser, and I turn javascript off in my graphical browser unless I want it on for a particular reason.
And now, the question: should my responsibility to my employer be to a) Get the thing out the door. Damned be your warm fuzzy feelings of doing something right when we just want to get the job finished and get paid for it.
b) Do what I consider to be the best job I can, and try to explain to an employer who will never see the back-end code and never turn off cookies that while a majority are, not everyone is in the same situation as he is.
What's the balance between moral imperatives and 'getting the job done'?
-T
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-- Regards: Ayudh
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