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Little development time vs perfect code?

5 points by symbion ↗ HN
I am sure I am not the only one to have this "issue".

I have created some small libraries for my side projects (mainly C++ lately) but I keep spending an awful lot amount of time trying to make it look good and take into account all corner cases while I should probably just be hacking away to get something working (i.e some kind of prototype).

How do you guys deal that ?

6 comments

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lumberjack
I use a priority list for each project. A working implementation would be a high priority. Security bugs too. Optimizing code a bit lower and so on and so forth.
symbion
Priority list ? Good idea. I have a JIRA instance for my project with all tasks though none of them are prioritised. It might seems slightly overkill but I guess I could use it to prioritise task/issues with it.

PS: Lumberjack ? Are you the one who wrote the Cocoa Lumberjac logging API by any chance ?

lumberjack
> PS: Lumberjack ? Are you the one who wrote the Cocoa Lumberjac logging API by any chance ?

Nope, though I wish I could say I did.

orjan
If you already have the tasks, prioritizing them should be fairly easy. Then just scan down the list until you find the first non-essential feature and there you draw the line. Anything after that goes into version two.
tzaman
Hack away to get something working putting those libraries to good use. Code will be optimized throughout the process.
symbion
You are right. Code optimisation should be a process rather than a task in itself.