First published April 2009. This was a period when I was working consistently on the material that would become, a decade and a half later, Tidy First?. If design is responsive motion in a space of all possible designs, then some designs are acceptable and some are not. Designing, then, is like walking an island. As long as you don’t get your feet wet, the design is okay. (This is a visual way of describing design as an optimization problem, but I’ll stick with the metaphor because it turns out to be surprisingly apt.)
Great read! I can’t believe that something written 15 years ago seems to make even more sense nowadays. Escaping local maxima seems to require exactly duplication and additional complexity.
Like all metaphors in software, it is most likely that this will be taken beyond all reason and someone will create a "terrain map" of the design and talk about software in elevation terms. :)
Great read! I can’t believe that something written 15 years ago seems to make even more sense nowadays. Escaping local maxima seems to require exactly duplication and additional complexity.
Like all metaphors in software, it is most likely that this will be taken beyond all reason and someone will create a "terrain map" of the design and talk about software in elevation terms. :)