Intentional Code - Minimalism in a World of Dogmatic Design - David Whitney - NDC Porto 2023

This talk was recorded at NDC Porto in Porto, Portugal. #ndcporto #ndcconferences #design #developer #softwaredeveloper

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A brief history of Design in software, reflecting on the history of the design patterns movement, clean code, and the long shadow they have cast over software development in the 2010s and beyond.

In this session we'll talk about intentionality in software design - and how you can radically simplify the way you build applications today to make them more meaningful to the humans that maintain them.

A radical look into why *every single character matters*, and why you should probably burn your copies of Clean Code.

[feoktant]

Someone needs to say this about Clean Code! It was one of my first read book about programming 10 years ago. Nowadays I do not recommend it

[helleye]

I dabble in unity from time to time, and nothing annoys me more than the recommended folder structure that groups things by what they are instead of where they belong (scripts, materials, animations, sprites, scenes etc). I felt the opening example in my bones.

[rafalp]

My thoughts about this speach are a bit mixed, but if I would start explaining that would be a lot of text :D I agree about intentional code. Code should be intentional, but I also think that it should be very easy to read and follow (proper naming and structure actually helps a lot), and it should be readable for everyone not only for the author.

Even though books like "clean code" can be summarized by few sentences, it's usually not enough to people to really remember that or use it. If that's written and repeated many times in different context, with many examples it just has higher chance to be remembered and truly used, that's my justification for books like 'clean code' etc.

[ramizazadaliyev]

It is ironic how the speaker criticizes Clean Code while promoting its MAIN principles: readibility with intent and communication to other humans (Chapter 2 and 3, and 10), simplicity vs complexity (Chapter 11), debuggability, abstractions (chapter 3), Formatting (Chapter 5), Successive Refinement (Chapter 14), TDD (Chapter 9) . I could probably find more

[Izopropilen]

the amount of people who didn't understand what he's talking about (and more so, why) is staggering

[motivatedpeon]

That's maybe why I did not become a programmer. Although I tried, multiple times, different languages, but to no avail. Great talk!

[hunahpuyamamoto]

Weird talk.

The presenter first trashes clean code as destructive dogma.

Then, every remaining minute is spent talking about—(drum roll)—Clean Code.

[WorstDeveloper]

I disagree that formatters such as the ones in Go are bad for readability. They make it way easier to read code across the whole ecosystem. There's nothing worse than having to adapt to a hundred different ways of formatting code across a hundred different codebases. It's a waste of time.

[adrianspikes]

Programming with Intent - Shiv Kumar. Code Opinion on YT talk about this for years now. It's crawl before you walk!

Clean code is about organization.

It was fun we i didnt have to care about that until i had to change or extend something. I find that its JS fanboys that really hate organizing because they would rather just code. Same thing with DDD, uts hard to find JS DDD on YT but fir C# its everywhere and no one complains.

[edgeeffect]

No one in the room has heard of Don. Knuth.... software developers are SO very very bad at history, especially the history of their own discipline. "A Knuth is as good as a feast"!
That "rage-tweeted architecture" right at the start is the way so many frameworks try to force you into believing that projects SHOULD be organised. This is very sad.