Pain means Gain

All problems worth solving have some associated "pain". Inventors will create something to "scratch their itch" and it is often said that "necessity is the mother of invention". The more pain you identify the more inventive ideas you can create. When it comes to invention pain is not a dirty word: pain means gain.

The initial pain I had was "code overload". I'd spent the previous four years writing two search engines: turbo10.com and trexy.com. But there was now just too much code!!! 100,000+ lines of code and growing. I could no longer hold it all in my brain. I was rewriting code that I'd already written because I couldn't find the old code in my morass of modules.

So to scratch this itch I needed to erect scaffolding separate from the code that allowed me to see it all in one place and traverse the interlinkages. Which modules call this module? The system I devised is similar to JavaDoc (a hypertext class browser) but also acts as a Content Management System (CMS). I gave a presentation to London Perl Mongers and YAPC::Europe 2004 called HELP!!! Code Overload.

The system worked well but it turned out to be only the beginning. I started to tune into more of the pain that I had while programming. I soon found lots of sources of pain. How else could I write code to help me code? This led me on the trail to the rest of the ideas behind The Goo ...