danux.co.uk :: Shifting focus

In a typical X was chatting to Y situation, with X being Adam from work, and Y being myself, I began thinking. We've been working together on and off at work for the past few weeks on a Django site. This is my third site in Django and feeling quite competent in the basics I've started biting off bigger tasks and thinking beyond what the framework provides. This had lead to some pretty decent code being written as we adapt Django, in particular the admin side of things, to the needs of our company.

So as Y was gloating to X about the latest addition, some fancy javascript that allows images to inserted into a tinyMCE area from the Django admin, it occurred to me that at best maybe 5 people will ever see or use this code I'd written. Of them only 2 people, X and Y, would have any understanding of its inner workings, its beauty and its elegance. Thus, over 50% of the users will simply click a button, see their image or file appear and continue doing whatever task it was they set out to do.

I've always held technical excellence as perhaps the highest metric for good software but as I gain more experience in the commercial world of development its importance is diminishing. In fact, let me rephrase that; I've begun to discover new metrics, and their relative importance has been rising at the expense of technical excellence. I realised that the real beauty of the code I'd written was the very fact my end user will never notice it. As I said, the button will be clicked, and on they go.

I remember a few years ago watching an interview with someone from the Lord of The Rings films who had been instrumental in the creation of Golem. He remarked that the thing that really set the film apart from the average High Fantasy adventure was how little people noticed the special effects. The fact that Lord of The Rings had made industry break throughs with its computer animation advancements was ratified by no one even noticing. The character blended seamlessly in to the story without the viewer ever needing to have their attention drawn to it.

I guess this is similar to my feelings now. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts comes to mind, and its something I think has taken me a long time to really understand. Clever widgets may impress, but what really matters is their ability to blend seamlessly into one coherent whole.

So where do I stand now? Well, technical excellence should be a given. Bad code simply shouldn't be written to start with. But what I now strive towards is this new kind of beauty I have discovered, a completely functional system that does exactly what the client needs. A simple, elegant whole.