building vs taping things together

Is there really a difference?

Yes..and..no..and..no.

The intended difference is that taped together works under demo load but not production load where as “built” does. But there’s a secret to taping stuff together that does handle production load.

“Hacky Js” Should work in theory. In 2024, computers are fast. You shouldn’t need “industrial strength code” or to spend time optimizing performance to get something that’ll scale. It should be possible to throw something hacky on a scaling system like Vercel or aws and It Just Scales. But when you do…something breaks. Something always goes wrong. So how do you pull off the fine art of shipping hacky js?

Get good.

One really great thing about getting good at fast programming is that you realize being good at fast programming is mostly about not making fatal mistakes. Don’t violate SPOT. Keep the code and data transparent. Fold complexity into the data. It’s the art of not shooting yourself in the foot. It’s honestly a really enjoyable art. Once you get the hang of it, you move smooth and fast. You start knocking things out without thinking about it because you’re no longer tripping over yourself.

And once you realize your potential as a “not shooter of yourself”, you unlock the secret to shipping “hacky” quick and dirty implementations. You whip up some code without fatal mistakes. Even your hacky code lacks the fatal mistakes and is actually pretty reliable. Even if it’s bash or some JS you threw together, it’ll work “surprisingly” well because there’s no real big mistakes.

Most importantly, it’s just so much dang fun to write this code and for it to just Work. When you get here, when you’re able to just slap something together quickly and hey wait it’s actually not that bad, we can ship this.

Woah, that’s cool.

That’s fast coding.