Julio Santos

I’m a big fan of French cuisine, Belgian chocolate and European pastry (especially Portuguese pastry). I’m also a huge fan of “agile practices that apply to real life” (it’s just something that tickles my brain).

I was watching Pierre Hermé on TV5 the other day. Pierre is a real artist and I’m not surprised he’s been dubbed the “Pastry Picasso”.

The stuff he was doing and talking about looked really good. He was talking about his “secret”, and of course it came down to passion, perseverance, top-notch ingredients, and…YAGNI.

Paraphrasing here:

“Wisdom is important. It’s crucial that you try not to put in one cake, everything you know. Instead stick to the essentials of what you’re trying to accomplish”.

It’s like he was saying “do not over-engineer” to programmers, or “watch out for feature-creep” to product managers.

Could it be that when us developers add complex and unnecessary features, we’re really trying to show off all of our talents? If I ask around why we do it, the most common answer I get is “because I’ve been doing this forever, and bad and unpredictable things do happen”.

Sure, but is that really the reason, or are we just trying to show how good and smart we are, in this one cake, er, program?

If you understand French, maybe you want to see the clip here.