Hacking till it works is no longer enough

Learning to code with editorial intent has been a pet project of mine for years by now, but this week was the first time I literally found myself in tears, because I couldn’t get something to work.  My father has a great story from his educational days, about how he changed degrees because he saw the first time, he didn’t like school. So it goes with the past few days.  Something has gone wrong with my path.  There are two options: recognize this has been a fun experiment, but it’s over now (this is not an option at all, I’ve learned too much and am way too committed), or figure out the problem and move forward.

I’ve looked at the code of really good journoprogrammers, people I have been lucky to count as mentors, and in comparison, my code tends to look like a jumbled mess of horror, whereas theirs is all…neat.  This isn’t about commenting, which I also “should” do more of, but how we organize our content.  It’s just like how when we write stories, we organize our notes and think about the structure.  But I’ve been so delighted that something actually works, I’ve slacked off.  Not to mention that having to code faster than ever before in my life means I leave out what I know I should do.

(My self-practice has also dwindled while I was on chemo.  Short story: Kidney disease comes back, I treat it like any coding problem, solve the bug, it goes back into remission.  Next?)

What does “should” mean anyway?  There are so many conventions.  I know people who learned CS in school got some of these through formal education. But why should I use these conventions? It’ s easy to self-deprecate — “Oh, you should see my crappy code!  It’s so horrible, and such a mess!”  Commiseration occurs.  But this is not something to be proud of. I wait for the moment when the “real developers” stop being polite, and complain when they have to update something, and tell me I’m too far behind.

Anyway, I’ve never been one to do things people tell me, without understanding the “why”? Why shouldn’t you repeat code in a project? This won’t be a surprise to the experienced ones reading, but it’s not because it’s some requirement for no reason, not some teacher trying to add restrictions to a rubric.  It’s easier to fix bugs, make changes, understand how your program works days, weeks and months after you wrote it, if you strip it down, make it comprehensible.

I’ve been working harder than ever before at my job, and I do love it, but I am bewildered.  I remember other mentors saying a core missing piece of my knowledge was  experience building “big systems.”  I arrived at my present employer, and I was told I was going to build big systems.  And I have, and I am, and I would not attempt it if I didn’t have the support of a team and organization that believes in me, in a way I can’t even comprehend yet.

Here’s the new deal, though.  Now, I need to build better.  Not be pleasantly surprised my code works. Choice words from a current mentor: “It’s not a question of if you can get the program to work, but how, when and if it’s worth your time.”  I live in fear of not hitting the when, and I think addressing how I code, will help me feel more confident about hitting those deadlines.

The concept of organizing code, I’m told by smart people, is “modular programming.”  The idea of breaking things up into pluggable, reusable pieces.  I’m hoping that’ll make it easier to comprehend what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it.  It also seems to work with the idea of Backbone, a technology I’m learning now.  I think I relied on frameworks like Django to do a lot of organization for me. Now that I use JavaScript much, much more often, that structure needs to be replicated and enforced.

If you have any tips on how to organize work more smartly, when crafting large-scale systems (and my large-scale systems aren’t really that large…yet), point me to examples, books, screencasts, articles, what have you. This isn’t the sexiest problem I’ve ever approached, but it is no less or more important than all the mapping work I’ve pursued.

The mission of 2012: Have the confidence to know I can.  Gain the knowledge to do it right, not just do it. Appreciate beautiful code itself, see it as more than a means to an end (awesome interactive stuff).

I’m really thankful for friends, family and colleagues who believe in me.  Without all of them, I would have given up on this long ago.  It is time to acknowledge I am in some intermediate stage of learning now, and that it is time to go big or go home. I’m not going home. I can’t help but feel I’m on the cusp of something big, once I figure this next step out.

Did I really say recognizing that I can’t do this was an option, at the beginning of the post.  Yeah, did anyone actually believe that was going to happen?

Mentors of the programming-journalism world: I’m coming at you for some guidance on this. Maybe I’ll even blog about it.