Coding, writing and make-believe

No, this isn't about fictions we construct about the world through software and stories alike. That's a whole other can of worms. This is about work.

When I first started coding, everyone was telling me to draw a flowchart first, and/or write pseudocode. I dutifully tried doing that, but it didn't seem to help me get any code written afterwards, let alone better code.

Later the UML craze started. The only thing I ever managed to do with UML was tie myself into knots with an overly complex class diagram that never became code either.

In the end I learned to simply write code. Because that's what the computer understands. That's how I progress towards getting the machine to play a game, or solve a problem. Everything else is make-believe.

Planning is good, but it's not actually going out there in the field to do the thing you were planning for.

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