✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

What is "good taste" in software engineering?

seangoedecke.com · 2,098 words · saved by 1 readers

Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with good taste. Like taste in general, technical taste sometimes runs ahead of your ability: just like you can tell good food from bad without being able to cook, you can know what kind of software you like before you’ve got the ability to build it. You can develop technical ability by study and repetition, but good taste is developed in a more mysterious way. Here are some indicators of software taste: I think taste is the ability to adopt the set of engineering values that fit your current project. Aren’t the indicators above just a part of skill? For instance, doesn’t code look good if it’s good code? I don’t think so. Let’s take an example. Personally, I feel like code that uses map and filter looks nicer than using a for loop. It’s tempting to think that this is a case of me being straightforwardly correct about a point of engineering. For instance, map and fil

Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with good taste. Like taste in general, technical taste sometimes runs ahead of your ability: just like you can tell good food from bad without being able to cook, you can know what kind of software you like before you’ve got the ability to build it. You can develop technical ability by study and repetition, but good taste is developed in a more mysterious way. Here are some indicators of software taste: What kind of code “looks good” to you? What kind of code “looks ugly”?

Explore this link on the map →

saved by

related reading