Most of us have probably heard the idiom: One man's trash is another man's treasure!
Even though I have heard this many times in life, I never realized how true this could be until a few weeks ago. I was attending a conference track, and the presenter, an Engineer working on a great innovative product, was explaining the challenges the team faced while working on the product. During this presentation, the Engineer mentioned about a session timeout problem while using a very popular open-source product, and how a developer from the open-source product team helped out the Engineer by writing a JSP (Java Server Page) as a workaround for the session time-out problem. As the Engineer was describing how smart the solution proposed by the developer was, I couldn't help thinking why this solution couldn't be regarded as a hack. Having developed many Java enterprise applications myself, I just couldn't understand why a JSP was required to address the session time-out problem of two servers components interacting with each other. This is not to say that this solution is wrong, it's just that I wouldn't have solved it this way.
I have never believed in hacking myself out of a coding problem, however, there are companies and developers who believe in it and some even organize "hackathons" to celebrate their IPO launch. So now I understand that "One person's hack is another person's gem", just the way "One man's trash is another man's treasure". I guess as long as we enjoy what we build, hack or gem is just a matter of perception, and this is one of those things that makes the world go round.
Even though I have heard this many times in life, I never realized how true this could be until a few weeks ago. I was attending a conference track, and the presenter, an Engineer working on a great innovative product, was explaining the challenges the team faced while working on the product. During this presentation, the Engineer mentioned about a session timeout problem while using a very popular open-source product, and how a developer from the open-source product team helped out the Engineer by writing a JSP (Java Server Page) as a workaround for the session time-out problem. As the Engineer was describing how smart the solution proposed by the developer was, I couldn't help thinking why this solution couldn't be regarded as a hack. Having developed many Java enterprise applications myself, I just couldn't understand why a JSP was required to address the session time-out problem of two servers components interacting with each other. This is not to say that this solution is wrong, it's just that I wouldn't have solved it this way.
I have never believed in hacking myself out of a coding problem, however, there are companies and developers who believe in it and some even organize "hackathons" to celebrate their IPO launch. So now I understand that "One person's hack is another person's gem", just the way "One man's trash is another man's treasure". I guess as long as we enjoy what we build, hack or gem is just a matter of perception, and this is one of those things that makes the world go round.
