The creative process of coding

You have a problem to solve.

You get the problem in your head and mull over it for a while, trying to consider all the angles.

You then consider the alternative ways you have to solve it. Like a good little programmer you think about what every possible alternative has going for and against it.

You start to make some tests and experiment a bit.

You make up your mind. This is “The Way” you say. You know what you are talking about, you’ve considered it, you covered all aspects, you tried it out you are in control, you are “the man”!

So now all you have to do is implement the thing and get on with your life.

And so you do it.

Only it doesn’t quite come together as you expected it.

Still, you know this is “The Way”, so you toil on, on the face of adversity and you make it work.

Well… Almost, it still doesn’t quite work. And what you ended up doing to the poor code? Man, you should be arrested! Beware the style police, you may never be able to show your face again to your fellow coders…

So you pause and think about it. You know you’ve messed up the implementation somehow, but how?

And one day you are hit on the head by a shovel (weeeell… it feels like it anyway) and you realize: “OMG, what was I thinking??” (yes, in your desperation you start talking like a l33t t33n, go figure…). The way to solve the problem, the better way, has just snuck up on you and is there in your brain, staring at you, making fun of you, calling you stupid and other less family-blog friendly names…

So you go back, undo all the code murdering you’ve done and put in the new, oh so elegant solution.

Of course it works first time, it is fast, it is clean, it is extendable and it has the new super-duper GTI engine!

Well, it was obvious, wasn’t it? It was staring you in the face all that time. Still you had to go and spend all that time and do all that dirty work just to get to it.

And now that you’ve been through all that you just can’t help yourself jumping on to the next challenge. Only this time you’re going to get it right, plan better and the good, clean solution is going to be implemented first. Now you know better.

Or do you?

God, I love being a geek!

Spam… Are we getting tired of this yet?

Well… I am, most definitely!

Yesterday evening my server got hit by a big volley of almost 600 comments and this afternoon another one of over 400 comments.

That’s it, I’m really going to have to do something about this.

First of all I’m leaving Movable Type. Not that MT in itself is the cause of all the spam I’m getting, but it does help, and since I am going to shake things up a bit I might as well go full length and move to something that suits my needs a bit more closely. You’ll see how in a while.

Then I’m going to implement two defense mechanisms on my new blogging platform: people who are authenticated may post straight ahead (I plan to support both users of my own site and TypePad-authenticated users), comments from people who are not authenticated will be moderated.

This makes me really sad, but I just can’t keep on spending this kind of time managing the garbage these morons leave on my site and I’m not even taking into account the bandwidth they take up…

Now I just have to find the time to set up the new platform and especially to make the transition as painless as possible. Of particular importance is the fact that permalinks should continue to be so, even though I’m changing platforms. I think I know how to make this work and if I can I will do it. Like I said, it’s all a matter of time.

So really this is a “thank you” post to all the lowly life-forms out there who have increasingly spammed my site for forcing me to overcome my basic laziness and get on with changing things like I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time now.

Oh, but you can still drop dead any time now, that would be just fine by me.