Two mind are better than one


Or, why the person sitting next to you might be able to see something you can't.

Since the beginning of the New Year I've been trying to get the Symcar web site so that it:

a, isn't an embarrassment
b, is of some use
c, gives some clue to the rest of the world about what Symcar is and does

The thing that I've discovered while doing this is how incredibly difficult it is to get a balance between usefulness and chaff - without spending all of my time writing web pages.

Hopefully I've managed to achieve a reasonable balance, but if I have it's because of the time I've spent (about 10x as much as I intended) and because I regularly ask other people to look at what I'm doing.

This leads nicely into a development issue: why don't more people get their peers to look at their code?

Whenever I've been working as part of a development team, I've always asked the guys I'm working with to review what I'm working on. Partly this is to catch those really stupid mistakes that everyone else sees straight-off, but are totally elusive to you despite you having spent the last 18 hours try to find them. And partly it's to get a fresh perspective on the problem as a whole. I've lost track of the number of times that I've coded myself into a corner, only to have a colleague see straight to the heart of the solution at first glance.

So getting back to the web site; it's been invaluable to me to get people's view and opinion on whatever it is I'm working on - and I definitely feel that this is as appropriate to a web site as it is to a software product. So, if you happen to drop by the Symcar website anytime soon please don't hold back any comments you might have - they could be invaluable to me getting it right!

Posted: Thu - January 15, 2004 at 05:39 PM        

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