Time to write some bad code

So: My wife hates snowboarding because she’s a good skier. She’s far sportier than me, and no doubt would be a much better snowboarder if she gave it a fair shake, but she just hates being a noob on the hill. I don’t downhill ski, so this never bothered me.

I’ve been having a hard time with Swift recently. Flaky debugger, scant documentation, and constant struggle trying to write ‘nice Swift’. I feel like every time I invest a serious stretch of time into trying to advance my summer project, I end up getting caught up in minutia, trying to find a ‘nice’ way to accomplish something I already know how to do.

I think what helped me last night was to stop trying so hard. I am a beginner. There’s a lot I don’t know. It’s hubristic to shoot for elegance when I don’t have the experience to back up that desire. It’s a particular trap because the markers of elegance that I’m used to, the tell-tales of craftmanship that signify competence in Objective-C might be completely wrong in Swift, and I’m spending a lot of fruitless time trying to literally reimplement them in this new language.

Realizing this made me feel a lot better. It’s a balance, but I’m going to embrace my inner spaghetti code monster. Time to write some bad code.

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Today’s blogpost was contributed by Josh Svatek, a participant in the informal Summer of Swift contest. Josh is owner & iOS Developer at the Brierwood Design Cooperative, and the organizer of SLUGGO, the Swift Language User Group for Gatineau / Ottawa in Canada.