Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I love Rails and will agree that it boosts productivity tremendously, but if you cut out the 80% of your time you spend on gruntwork, you'll find that 80% of your remaining time is spent on gruntwork relative to your increased capabilities.

Which means the economics of "OK, outsource the gruntwork!" still make sense.

I have a RoR website which is probably pushing 1,000 lines these days. (1,000 lines in Java will, maybe, get a single page mostly done at the day job.) It blows away my day job in terms of functionality. You want to know what about 800 of those lines look like? Grunt work. (Validation that a user has a name and email address? Takes 1 line... 1 line of grunt work. Verifying that anyone using these 27 actions is an administration? 1 line... of grunt work. Implementing a search function for lost registration keys? Four lines... of grunt work. etc)

The point is that at a certain point writing the code gets easier than writing a spec.

Lets say you outsource this site, and you send a spec to the developer the spec looks something like this: 1) These 27 actions should only be used by an administrator. 2) All users must register with a valid looking email and choose a username.

Every one of those would still take one line, wouldn't it be simpler to just code the damn thing yourself???

Test driven development might help here. The test cases you write will act as spec, ensure quality of what they deliver and will also enable further development. You have not wasted your effort.

"(Validation that a user has a name and email address? Takes 1 line... 1 line of grunt work. Verifying that anyone using these 27 actions is an administration? 1 line... of grunt work. Implementing a search function for lost registration keys? Four lines... of grunt work. etc)"

This doesn't make sense as a definition of "grunt work" to me. These are more like business process rules or requirements. And 1 line or 27 lines or 4 lines of code sound actually more efficient to me than the corresponding English, mock-ups, etc. needed to specify the documentation for them.

In other words, it probably takes you much less time to write those lines of code than it would take to describe the required functionality unambiguously to someone living across an ocean from you.

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