blog.philcrissman.com

Again, I’m going to continue to use “hack” in ye olde sense of interesting and/or excellent coding. And in this context, we’ll let “development” stand for the sort of coding you might do at work; something businessey, something enterprisey. It’s all good. I’ve been writing about this a lot. I hope that’s okay.

UML is usually seen as a very corporate (i.e., boring) tool. It implies planning, best practices, and all those other things.

Hacking is usually described as a paradigm of just sitting down and starting to code, and altering your architecture along the way as you need to.

I think that’s fine, possibly even beneficial, for small projects, or projects worked on my one individual. But as soon as you decided to get a team working on a project… you need some way to represent parts of the application so people know how it works. Yes, we could just invent a new ad hoc representation scheme every time we need to do this… or we could just use UML.

When I decided that I wanted to change my career and “go into computers”, I had a very limited exposure to computing.

Well… I should qualify that. It’s true, I had used DOS so much in high school (before there was Windows) that I preferred DOS to the Macintosh of that day, wrote my own autoexec.bat files, and in fact had a copy of DOS, Pascal, and Moria on 5.25” floppy disks that pretty much went everywhere with me. At the time, many DOS PCs did not have hard drives; you loaded the OS from a floppy, then it ran from memory and you put in some other disk with your files or other programs on it.