[cgio]

A great skill I have been developing as I mature is the ability to look at a seemingly suboptimal implementation I receive and not be appalled by the perceived sub-optimality but rather appreciative of the history that is embedded in the little details. For me, any system producing correct and useful results is perfect under the constraints of its implementation. Even if the developer was not great, someone was great enough to mitigate for it. I have seen many such ugly, perfect systems.

[geertj]

That is a great skill. I’ve been calling this ‘respect for working software.’ There’s tons of benefits. First it improves your decision making with respect to evolving this piece of software, as you are now less likely to embark on a unnecessary rewrite or refactor. Second it lowers your stress as you can actually enjoy working on the piece of code. Overall you’ll be a (much) more effective SDE.

[fer]

I call it software kintsugi[0].

https://traditionalkyoto.com/culture/kintsugi/

[brunooliv]

hey this is super good, might even attempt to put together a short blog post with this as the central idea! thanks!

[fer]

I actually felt like writing it first[0], feel free to take inspiration from it.

[0]https://www.fer.xyz/2021/11/software-kintsugi

[cgio]

Excellent post and thank you for the quote! In retrospect a bit self referentially I would lacquer some things in my phrasing but I think part of kintsugi is that aspect of enabling the latent agency of corrections and additions to the body of initial intention that links all creators across time. In that respect your post is a much better state of things than me finetuning my words.

[xyzzy21]

Nice. I'll have to use that idea.