My Kind of Stupid

Web development, user interfaces, and other development topics.

URL-Driven Development is README-Driven Development

While working on Web Queue today I went to document the URLs to help me figure out the interface. As I was about to start writing out the URLs, I realized I could make it a lot easier on myself by giving the document some structure. So I decided to roll it into the README, which also needed to be written.

As I wrote up the README, everything became a bit clearer. Up to that point, I had been fussing over details, learning how to use OAuth and the Netflix API while poorly maintaining a few different classes. Writing the README allowed me to step back and conceive the system as a whole, which made the necessary code much more clear to me. That's README-driven development.

My projects often go like this. I'm almost always learning a new technology or library, so I can't always start off with a good architecture. But starting with the interface can make things a lot clearer.

Writing out the URLs for a project is pretty similar to writing the README. It has the same goal, figuring out the interface of a project, but focused on web applications instead of any other project. And as I'm learning from personal experience, that can be exactly what's needed for a good project.

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