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<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.juliobiason.me"><h1>Julio Biason .Me 4.3</h1></a>
<p class="lead">Old school dev living in a 2.0 dev world</p>
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<h1 class="post-title">Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Spec First, Then Code</h1>
<span class="post-date">
2019-06-18
<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/books/">#books</a>
<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/things-i-learnt/">#things i learnt</a>
<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/specs/">#specs</a>
<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/code/">#code</a>
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<p>&quot;Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an
empty text file.&quot; -- Louis Srygley</p>
<span id="continue-reading"></span>
<p>If you don't know what you're trying to solve, you don't know what to code.</p>
<p>A lot of times we have this feeling of &quot;let me jump straight to the code&quot;. But
without understanding what problem you're trying to solve, you'd end up
writing a bunch of things that doesn't solve anything -- or, at least,
anything that <em>should</em> be solved.</p>
<p>So here is the point: Try to get a small spec on whatever you want to solve.
But be aware that even that spec may have to be <a href="/books/things-i-learnt/throw-away">thrown
out</a>, as the understanding of the problem
tend to grow as long as the project continue.</p>
<p>Yes, it's paradoxical: You need a spec to know what to code to avoid coding
the wrong solution, but the spec may be wrong, so you <em>end up</em> solving the
wrong solution anyway. So what's the point? The point is, the spec reflects
the understanding of a problem <em>at a certain point</em>: All you (and your team)
know is <em>there</em>.</p>
<p>The times I stood longer looking at my own code wondering what to do next were
when we didn't have the next step defined: It was missing some point of the
solution or we didn't have the communication structures defined or something
of sorts. Usually, when that happened, I stumbled upon Twitter or Mastodon
instead of trying to solve the problem. So when you see yourself doing this
kind of stuff -- &quot;I don't know what to do next, and I'm not sure if I'm done
with the current problem&quot; -- then maybe it's time to stop and talk to other
people in the project to figure that out.</p>
<p>Another way to think this: Erik Deitrich have a post about <a href="https://daedtech.com/dont-learn-to-code-learn-to-automate/">Don’t Learn to
Code — Learn to Automate</a>,
something I can get behind 'cause most of us, when doing stuff, think &quot;I need
to do this, then I pick that thingy and put it there and from there I do this
other work&quot;. Basically, we create mental models of specs, step by step, on
what we need to do. And, from there, it may be even simpler, 'cause now all
you need to learn is &quot;First, how I do this; Ok, got it, now I get the result
from this and put there&quot; and so on. You can even have a learning path, if
you're a beginner.</p>
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