Becoming a Better Programmer

Chapter 31. Smarter, Not Harder

Battles are won by slaughter and maneuver. The greater the general, the more he contributes in maneuver, the less he demands in slaughter.

Winston Churchill

Let me tell you a story. It’s all true. A colleague, working on some UI code, needed to overlay pretty rounded arrows over his display. After he struggled to do it programmatically using the drawing primitives provided, I suggested he just overlay a graphic on the screen. That would be much easier to implement.

So off he went. He fired up Photoshop. And fiddled. And tweaked. And fiddled some more. In this, the Rolls-Royce of image composition applications, there is no quick-and-easy way to draw a rounded arrow that looks halfway decent. Presumably an experienced graphic artist could knock one up in two minutes. But after almost an hour of drawing, cutting, compositing, and rearranging, he still didn’t have a convincing rounded arrow.

He mentioned it to me in frustration as he went to make a cup of tea.

On his return, tea in hand, he found a shiny new rounded arrow image sitting on his desktop ready for use.

“How did you do that so quickly?” he asked.

“I just used the right tool,” I replied, dodging a flying mug of tea.

Photoshop should have been the right tool. It’s what most image design work is done in. But I knew that Open Office provides a handy configurable rounded arrow tool. I had drawn one in 10 seconds and sent him a screenshot. It wasn’t elegant. But it worked.

The moral?

There is ...