Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

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Solving problems that move the needle for the company in terms of customer experience, financials, or things like that are worth promotion. Sometimes these are complex problems. Sometimes not.

Software isn't an art project; it's a practical tool to solve practical problems.

Some of my more impactful changes haven't been all that complex; it was just a matter of knowing where and when to spend my time, based on working with our customer team, sales team, and directly talking to some customers.

One of my more praised changes was adding a link to our support backend that saved our customer team minutes of manual work every time. This was literally just adding a permalink: 3 minutes of work. Simple and low-complexity? Yes. But also impactful and moved the needle, and no one else had done it in the previous years.

> Software isn't an art project; it's a practical tool to solve practical problems.

Yet me and my colleagues have seen code that resembles abstract art far too often - it's interesting to look at, but mind-bogglingly complex. Getting rid of that is a delicate balance act, as you risk stepping on the shoes of the people who wrote the code.

Yes it's a problem; that's why I've started to use the "this isn't an art project" line, because some people really do seem to treat it as such.

I do see writing software like writing a book. I write it with the future reader in mind. It needs to be meant to be read.

I picture my colleagues or young engineers 20 years from now combing through my programs, learning the problem domain, learning the tradeoffs we made at the time and why it made sense.

with that analogy, I'd say code is more like the annotations of the manuscript before the reader sees the final print of the book

Which means you need to throw out half of the initial version and rewrite it!

Absolutely! Prototypes are great

>One of my more praised changes was adding a link to our support backend that saved our customer team minutes of manual work every time.

I used to support a ton of random apps written as domino databases, and often would make someone's day by doing small changes like that. Things like adding one new column that saved them tons of time in cross referencing data. It was super fulfilling to have someone mention that they spend literal weeks of the year doing some task and I'd be able to totally eliminate the need for that task altogether.

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