the power of nothing

Sometimes you get a bright idea, or you are given a difficult task, and you want to start working on it. It's intoxicatingly easy to dream up feature upon feature for a new project, or build a giant architecture to solve a problem, all of these things look powerful. The other problem that we run into is that with software anything is possible with enough code, and the people that write code like to work on interesting complex problems. This leads to conversations like this.

• First Dev: I want this new project to seamlessly integrate with eBay, digg, and amazon


• Second Dev: Those seem arbitrary, maybe we should define some sort of data import protocol


• First Dev: Yea, then we just need a scraper piece that uses the adapter pattern to translate various websites into the standard import protocol and feed the project


• Second Dev: I'll start defining a dtd and you can start writing up some xslt for eBay and digg and amazon as a proof-of-concept


• First Dev: Great, then we just need to get the exchange support and the poor man's cron jobs running, to send out the periodic updates


• Second Dev: Should we integrate with Twitter?


• First Dev: I don't see why not


• Third Dev (interrupting): Wait, what are we developing?


• First Dev: Todo list


• Third Dev: Maybe we should get it to store and delete todo list items first


• Second Dev: That's the easy part, the multitouch integration is going to be the hard part


• Third Dev: ...

[caption id="attachment_57" align="alignright" width="300" caption="the dream"][/caption]

Before we get the product to do something simple, something any moron could code up, we want to start slapping on features and bells and whistles and whizbangs. This is all fun, because whizbangs are fun things to think about and code and its all well and good until you realize you have coded up a great feed reader, but one hell of a lousy todo list. Focusing on least viable product in the beginning gives you a concrete base to start applying whizbangs, based off of real world feedback and grounded in reality. Incrementally building up value off of an existing product is easier and makes more sense than building a giant all-in-one application that can do everything but butter your toast that no one wants to use.

So this leads me to the best way forward in my estimation and experience, nothing. Nothing is incredibly powerful, tremendously liberating, and allows you to get something up and running in least viability mode or to solve a complex issue.

I can hear it already, what the hell are you talking about you mentally unstable person?! Let's look at some tools that exemplify nothing and how you can go from nothing to something quickly and incrementally, but only if you start with nothing.

Mock-ups. What is a mock-up, nothing really, just a fancy picture of what you want an interface to look like. There are many great tools for making mock-ups, a new one that just hit beta is mockingbird, a more seasoned veteran in this game is the excellent Balsamiq. These shouldn't help, we all know what a todo-list looks like, why would mocking one up help us? Because, even though we are capable of abstract thinking it is much easier if we have a concrete model to wrap our heads around. Like I said in tool roundup

[talking about a sweet visualization I made] ...but it is a much better reference when working with this particular part of the system than looking at the database table and trying to assemble parts of it in my brain as the situation demands.

If we don't have a concrete model we force our brains to construct one on the fly, taking us out of our work and into a conceptualization, having a concrete model frees up precious processor cycles in our brain. A mock-up is also great because it allows us to take nothing, a simple functionless mockup, and quickly turn it into an actual interface. What does that button do? Nothing! What about that one? Nothing!!! Then we can slowly but surely add functionality to our interface until we have a functional least viable product. The way we got there was by understanding that we start with nothing and work our way gradually to something. Sure we could have sat down at the keyboard and pounded away code for a day or two and then run the thing, but the faster we can get it on the screen and start iterating over it, the better.

The second way that nothing can be useful is when tackling a huge problem, lets look at the contrived feed reader problem from up above. How in the world do we go about solving that?! Well we employ are good friend nothing, and we build from there. What's would the simplest possible solution be?

[php]
$feed = FeedReader::read("http://www.digg.com");
[/php]

We can throw that in our program, now we need to deal with the FeedReader class

[php]
class FeedReader {
static function read($url) {
return '';
}
}
[/php]

Nothing to the rescue, we just defined our super simple API, but we aren't quite to functional yet, but we have a foothold now to iterate from.

[php]
class FeedReader {
static $readers = array('http://www.ebay.com' => new EbayReader(),
'http://www.digg.com' => new DiggReader(),
'http://www.amazon.com' => new AmazonReader));

static function read($url) {
$reader = self::get_reader($url);
if($reader) {
return $reader->process();
}
}

static function get_reader($url) {
return self::$readers[$url];
}
}
[/php]

Wow look we are almost all the way to functionality, amazing!!! Thank you nothing (that's what EbayReader, DiggReader, and AmazonReader do). Now its the simple task of implementing those, which each by themselves is a somewhat complicated task and outside the scope of this blog post.

This sort of top down design though can be very helpful, you need to solve a problem, just pretend that you have an API that already solves it and start calling it, stub out those functions (stub is a fancy computer science term for "make it do nothing"), and watch the power of nothing first hand. Then you fill in the blanks, allowing yourself to have more nothing functions, you successfully break up your huge monster task into simple solvable tasks.

When we combine the first technique with the second we can get truly awesome results, we normally call this Rapid Application Development (or the much cooler 1980's name, RAD). RAD can get us to something faster than almost anything, using the power of nothing.