We’ve all done it. You start a proof-of-concept project to try to figure something out. Almost no planning or thought goes into it, you just dive right in. You finally get something working, but just barely. Now you’re in fix it mode. Hacking away at it, trying to salvage it, trying to mold it into something usable.
It’s not that bad, you say. A little refactoring here, some more over there. Patch this, whack that. Oh wait, shouldn’t I be testing this?
I just went through this and caught myself before I went too far down this rabbit hole.
The idea is a digital picture frame app for the iphone using images from Facebook. Sure, there are apps that already do this, but I wanted some exposure to the Facebook api. I also wanted to do a relatively small iphone app before I dive into some of my other ideas for projects.
It was going along pretty well. I wrote some code to pull down pictures from Facebook. I had some code that cycled through the pictures. Then I started trying to shove more feature into it. I definitely need some settings, right? Where will the Facebook connect button go? I’ll definitely need some background threads!
As I started on my third pass of refactorings, I realized what I was doing…poor code didn’t know what hit it.
Now, taking the lessons learned and some code snippets (for reference), it’s time to toss the proof of concept into the trash bin. It’s where it belongs.
