TITLE: Doing It Wrong Fast
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: November 17, 2008 8:58 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Just this weekend I learned about
Ashleigh Brilliant,
a cartoonist and epigrammist. From little I've seen
in a couple of days, his cartoons remind me of
Hugh MacLeod's
business-card doodles
Gaping Void
-- only with a 1930s graphic style and language that
is more likely SFW.
This Brilliant cartoon, #3053, made it into my Agile
Development Hall of Fame on first sight:
Doing it wrong fast means that we have a chance to
learn sooner, and so have a chance
to be less wrong than yesterday.
This lesson was fresh in my mind over the weekend from
a small dose of programming. I was working on the
financial software
I've
decided to write for myself,
which has me exploring a few corners of PLT Scheme that
I don't use daily. As a result, I've been failing more
frequently than usual. The best failures come rat-a-tat-tat,
because they are often followed closely by an a-ha!
Sunday, just before I learned of Brilliant's work, I
felt one of those great releases when, for the first
time, my code gave me an answer I did not already know
and had not wanted to compute by hand: our family net
worth. At that moment I was excited to verify the
result manually (I'll need that test later!) and enjoy
all the wrong wrong work that had brought me to this
point. Brilliant has something.
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