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RailsToItaly, report of the 1st day

October 29th, 2007

  Yesterday the keynote was by Zed Shaw, the author of the Mongrel web server. His laptop wouldn’t work with the beamer so he had to improvise without his slides—We did get to see the original presentation the next day. Anyway I was not disappointed: the topic of his talk was programming ethics, “by which I do not mean ‘do not throw Chinese dissidents in jail’…”. Rather, he presented us with three rules that he follows when he’s coding. The first rule is “You cannot communicate sufficiently”, which means that even if you put a lot of care into making your code clear, intention-revealing and understandable, it’s still possible that your code will not be perceived as such by others. Just imagine what would happen then if you didn’t put care into making it understandable!


  Zed also said that Agile people tend to take the DRY principle too rigidly, coming up with very complex ways of removing duplication; yet it’s much more important to communicate clearly what the code is doing than removing every bit of duplication. Sure, we should not copy-and-paste code; but a little duplication is better than complexity.

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