World’s Largest Ball of Paint
Some time ago I read an article about this man that spent 27 years making the World’s Largest Ball of Paint. I’m starting to think that my company should try and purchase this ball of paint as a symbol of our software design strategy. Think of the baseball at the center as the basic design and framework for our product. Each layer of paint, then, represents a hack added to this care design. In the end you have this heavy unwieldy ball that could crack open at any minute.
For the last couple months I’ve been working on research and prototyping for our next major product release, version 5.1. This is our chance to fix all of the problems with our designs and remove all of the duct tape and chewing gum that’s been holding our product together, replacing it with a better thought out design and a more define module-to-module contract. Each time we come up with something it’s shot down because it’s too big a change. Now we’re basically reduced to putting a new layer of paint on our crumbling ball to hide the cracks that’ve been revealed with time.
