The Developer's Code

Essay 46

A Plug-in Happy Culture

There’s a beautiful irony to our medium. While scripting really great code is difficult, once we’ve written that exquisite code, we can redistribute it to the rest of the world easily, without any loss of fidelity or quality. Great code doesn’t lose its intrinsic worth once a lot of other programmers have their hands on it. Quite the opposite, in fact.

As a community, programmers help out other programmers all the time. We can expedite many of our processes by pulling something off the shelf that our colleagues have built for us.

Building Apps Is Like Going to a Walmart

For instance, we can write more maintainable style sheets by using Sass before converting it to CSS. We have jQuery and CoffeeScript at our ...