Duct Tape [Jim's Blog]

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====== Duct Tape ======

<wrap lo>Sunday September 1, 2013</wrap>

A few years ago, a colleague and good friend of mine described me as a “magic bullet” programmer, in that I tend to spend insane amounts of time trying to find the “right” language/IDE/platform for any given project, instead of //just picking something and getting to work//.

I just stumbled across this article, and I think it effectively describes this problem of over-engineering and the solution:

[[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html|The Duct Tape Programmer]]

The takeaway? Don’t succumb to the peer-pressure of new/shiny/complex.

The programmer in question, Jamie Zawinski, worked for Netscape in a past life. He is also one of many tech types profiled in [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush|Code Rush]], an interesting documentary detailing the effort to release the source code for the Netscape web browser. This code would eventually become [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox|Firefox]].