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FEATURE

The Assumption Approach

Have the confidence to build your project the right way

Issue: 10.2 (January/February 2012)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 23,331
Starting Page Number: 43
Article Number: 10209
Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

There's an old adage of what assuming makes you. Assumptions generally lead to problems later when you find out they're wrong. We're therefore taught assumptions are bad. "Never assume," is the command. But I'm here to tell you that assuming can be a good thing.

What I want you to do is assume you know what you're doing. If you're like me, you may not be all that confident about your development skills. We all have various levels of experience. We all have areas of expertise and areas of ignorance and it's easy to take the former for granted and overemphasize the latter.

There are certain kinds of tasks I've worked on many times and I can have absolute confidence I can create those projects because I've done it before. But there are other areas where I'm weak. Often I've got an idea for software to do something—but I'm not really sure my approach is the right one or even if it will work at all.

A Typical "Clueless" Workflow

The "clueless" workflow can also be called the "seat of the pants" approach to programming. This where you just experiment and try to get some code working.

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