Archive for 19th September 2005

And by “architecture,” we mean “big ball of mud”

Sigh. I’m just ramping up on a project. Client sez all the right things: “best practices,” “do the right thing,” etc. We develop an architectural proposal; they sign off on it. We develop our first prototype, they say “Whoa, nelly! What’s with all them thar interfaces and patterns and whatnot? Couldn’t you just… you know… simplify things?” It drives me crazy: this idea that fewer classes (or, what they really mean, fewer source code files) means “easy to understand.” I’m not talking about “you ain’t gonna’ need it,” either – I’m talking about people complaining about separating interfaces from implementation. Why are all the good clients taken?

Hardcore enough for casey

casey chesnut, who does things like integrate machine vision into videogames and writes neural nets that defeat CAPTCHAs, says that the PDC was the best conference he’s ever been to, so I guess I’m in the minority in thinking that it wasn’t hardcore enough.