Write Code For Next Time

I’ve been writing code for over 15 years. I've been writing good code for less than two. If you are a developer you understand this difference. If you aren't, read on.

I believe there is nuance in anything and recognizing nuance can only come with experience. In code this is the difference between writing code that works and building something sustainable, scalable and in the end successful. It’s tough no matter what, and its toughest for agencies. A product team has their one product to worry about. Ideally that’s one team, one environment and one vision. For an agency we must abstract our thinking and our strategies even further. We need to think about market trends, business development pipeline, current clients, repeat business opportunities and execute with all of that in mind.

At Hungry we've spent a lot of time thinking about this. Our vision is to continually invent better hammers not tool-sheds. By this I mean we build abstracted interfaces. Ways to interact. We've built modules for bootstrapping AngularJS for example and we have boilerplate OAuth2 modules (consumer and server). We have hundreds of low level interfaces that quite frankly we can't do anything with. But when we put them together, and when we put them behind an idea we can design, build and launch faster than any other developer/agency I've met, ever.

This level of abstraction is absolutely key for an agency, and for any professional developer. If you are capable of thinking strategically about abstracting your tools for reuse; your code will be much improved and in the future you'll be able to produce products immeasurably faster and better than before.