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Humbling experiences: when other programmers write simpler, more elegant code

Many times I’ve been humbled by other programmers. Just this last summer I worked on a project with Scott Meves. We were using the Symfony framework, the same framework that WP Questions is built in. Scott is a true genius when it comes to Symfony. I recall we needed to do some JOIN calls to the database using the Propel ORM, and Scott always knew the perfect, most concise way to write such code. It was humbling to work with him and see the elegance of the code that he wrote. So I can related to what Hafiz Rahman is saying here:

It all began with Darren Hoyt’s tweet:

interesting new question over at WPQ courtesy of @jophillips, any ideas? – http://bit.ly/7NOEl3

The particular question was about adding an “old” or “new” class for a listed Links based on whether the Link is inserted less/more than 31 days from now.

Curious, I dug around the Codex and into the core files. I began to think about filtering wp_list_bookmarks. Tabs upon tabs were opened, lines of code tested. Finished, I logged in into my WPQuestions account and opened the page again.

Amazingly, the question was already solved (this is only a couple hours after Darren linked to it), and there I saw two different solutions, both solved the problem with a short and easy to understand piece of code. One of it involved editing core file, which generally is undesirable, but both codes were undeniably elegant and to-the-point.
Lesson Learned

Compared to those two codes, mine was much longer: it involves regular expressions, string replacement, and so on. While it did work, I concluded that I was just thinking too far. The first solution didn’t worry about editing core files, while it’s something completely out-of-question for me. The second solution simply do away with creating its own list, while I insisted on making use of wp_list_bookmarks‘ output, forcing me to go the regex route.

…To put it short: I had too many rules in mind while looking for a solution.

The question was “Change the class of a blogroll link if older than 30 days“.

As I said, I can relate to what Rahman is saying. I certainly know what it is like to spend hours thinking about a very complex solution to a problem, and then later realize (or have someone show me) that there was a more elegant solution. I hope WP Questions continues to attract such quick, elegant solutions as those offered for this question.

Responses to your responses

We are grateful for all of the praise and feedback that we have received over the last month. I’m going to take this opportunity to respond to some of it.

Thomas Maier writes::

WP support. Basically what you expected, right? Yes, from an superficial perspective. WP Questions introduced a whole new idea to a world which was totally uncommerical: Payment. And what it makes so cool is that these fucking five bucks or what you spend for a emergency question make it incredibly efficient and really fast. You’ll get quick and professional answers. And ideally by answering questions of others you “win” your money back. And above all it has a great and simple design which impressed me quite a bit.

That sums it up well: introducing a commercial element is the aim. I think the free forums are somewhat unfair to the experts who volunteer their time there. Ultimately, the success of WP Questions should be judged by whether or not we make it easier for experts to earn money off of their knowledge. In response to the launch of WageMachine, I said:

I’ve had stretches of $100 an hour work followed by stretches of almost no work coming in, and I’ve been left wondering, why isn’t there more in the middle? And why can’t my own wage vary up and down casually, depending on circumstances, including such trivial circumstances as:

Am I at a friends house, waiting on a friend?

Am I bored and trying to kill time?

At such times I often go on to forums and answer people’s questions. Such work isn’t worth $100 an hour but it is worth something. So why aren’t there more places where I could pick up some money for answering such questions?

Implicit in the idea of “make it easier for experts to earn money off of their knowledge” is “give askers faster and better quality answers”. I believe these 2 aims fit together naturally.

Scribu offers this review of our site:

What you’re paying for is not the knowledge itself – you could get that free of charge, by asking in the WordPress.org support forums. But by asking on WP Questions, you have a higher chance of getting a timely answer from one or more knowledgeable people, whereas in the WP.org forums your question could simply be overlooked or be given a half-baked answer.

I really think this could work. With the ever-growing user base of WordPress, a need for reliable, high-quality support is starting to appear. See WP Help Center for instance.

It was my frustration with “half-baked answers” that lead me to start thinking about a site like this. As I wrote in the very first post:

And yet, over the years, I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with free forums. I find it frustrating when I post a question that is altogether unique, but someone mistakes it for a common question, and so the only reply I get is “RTFM!!!!!” When people offer you free help, sometimes they are wonderful, but sometimes they attack you for aspects of your project that are beyond your control. For instance, I was once asked to fix a Javascript slideshow that depended on jQuery for functionality, and when I posted some of the code to a forum, the only response I got was “Do not use jQuery!” But it was the lead programmer on that project who had decided to use jQuery, and I didn’t have the power to change that. I only had the power to fix the problem that I had been assigned.

In the comments, I was confused by this:

I covered the site in July of 2008

We launched just 4 weeks ago, on December 8th of 2009. The domain name was previously owned by Leland of themelab.com. I was under the impression that he had never used the domain name for anything, but I could be wrong about that.

There’s a search field, but it would be nice if the site had a public archive of questions answered in the past.

This is good advice, and we’ve adopted the suggestion. The archives are now public. We may in the future adopt a mixed model.

Will WP Questions still be here next year?

I hope so! And I hope by then we’ve been able to roll out similar sites for MySql, PHP, Ruby, Groovy, Grails, etc.

Oliver Schlöbe writes up a plugin from code that he posted on WP Questions. In the spirit of our fundraiser, we expect to eventually have partially hidden archives, paid access, and we hope to pay royalty payments to peple who have offered answers like Oliver.