It made sense at the time

I pass this wonderful bit of plumbing most workdays and suspected it would get blipped one day. Today is that day, but only partly because I left the office late and had nothing else in the camera. It just seemed rather appropriate.

We rarely have the benefit of hindsight. Designs evolve to meet changing requirements. I think it's clear that this arrangement of pipes has grown organically. It's hard to imagine it being designed like this from the outset - although you never know of course! There are bits of my software like this. The design starts off making sense and is reasonably elegant. But then the client changes their mind. And there is a critical deadline. Functions are added on, expanded, changed in purpose, tweaked to behave in a different way to that originally planned. The intention is always there to take it apart and put it back together in a more coherent way, but then another deadline crops up and there is an irresistible temptation to simply bend the code a bit further rather than rewriting it - in the always sincere belief that there will be time to redesign it properly soon. The reality, of course, is that never happens.

I can well imagine that behind the slick and elegant facade of many a web site there is plumbing like this. I'm sure this one is no exception! It's almost inevitable with any complex piece of software which evolves over time. We paid the price for some of that dodgy plumbing today. When it springs a leak it can be horribly difficult to track down the source and put a fix in place. A lot of what I should be doing at the moment is trying to replace the more dodgy pipes before they spring leaks - but this rarely seems to get to the top of the priority list.

This is the last evening I'm going to have both my boys at home for some while now. Roam is off to University in London on Saturday and, with the cricket season over at the weekend, Forrest will be at his student house in Leeds for most of the time. I'm off now to cook a nice meal for us all. It feels like the end of an era.