Don’t Love Writing Code

Taking a break from code samples and examples today, I want to talk a little bit about my philosophy about development.  Though it may surprise those of you reading this, I don’t like writing code.  Sure there’s that little bit of excitement that comes from a particularly ingenious snippet; but in general I don’t like the process of writing code.  However, I contend that my greatest strength as an engineer is that I don’t like to write code.

Lots of code is not brilliant code

I see them (and their code) every day; people who genuinely enjoy and revel in writing code.  These people can get completely engrossed in solving a problem; spend hours and hours working on the problem, and churn out 500+ lines of code that are truly a marvel to look at.  You stare in amazement as you look at this code; how thorougly complicated it seems.  The natural instinct of many developers is to look at that code and say “Congratulations to the brilliant person who solved this obviously incredibly complex problem.”  It’s just that there’s a larger issue: a truly adept engineer will look at their code and say “Well why didn’t you just do this?” and proceed to write 10 lines of code that do the same thing in a far simpler, more understandable, and easier to maintain fashion.  I’m sure just about everyone working in any type of software development environment has seen this.  The problem, I contend, is that it doesn’t happen enough.

Don’t write the code; solve the problem.