Rob Walling

And when you're first exposed to any of these things, you don't yet know what's good or bad because you lack taste.

You lack that editorial eye.

And the reason I like the term editorial eye is it implies a level of discernment.

And it applies the ability to not just have taste and be snooty, this is good or bad, but to potentially editorialize it.

And that's what I want to talk about today.

I was thinking about the three stages of developing an editorial eye in any medium.

Again, whether that's movies, books, design, code.

The first is exposure, to just figure out what's good and what's bad.

Right.

It's exposure to many films or to many books or to writing and reading a lot of code, not just writing code, by the way.

I find that the people who have only written code have never worked on a team, have never had to get into a code base that they've never seen before.

It's like they're code blind and they've only experienced the way they do it.

And they have these really strong opinions about how it should be done.

And this code base is a piece of shit.

Because the whole thing needs to be rewritten.

It's like the famous, you know, the famous agency or new dev that comes in.

It's often folks who have not had to adopt code bases that they themselves didn't write.

But the idea here with knowing what's good and bad is that you get enough exposure to enough variations of this thing that you've seen enough work to develop a sense of quality.

You can't form an editorial eye by watching one movie, right?

Or reading one book.