Alright, so I’ve been meaning to share this little experiment I did a while back. You might have heard whispers about this “Michael Devin” approach, or maybe not, he’s not exactly mainstream. But his ideas about stripping things back to basics in development really caught my eye.
Getting Started with Devin’s Ideas
I stumbled upon some articles and forum posts talking about Michael Devin and his philosophy. The main gist, as I understood it, was to build software with the absolute bare minimum. No fancy frameworks, no heavy libraries unless your life depended on it. Just pure, unadulterated code. Sounded like a breath of fresh air, honestly. I was getting pretty fed up with projects that had more dependencies than actual code.
So, I thought, why not? I had this small utility I wanted to build for myself – just a little something to organize my notes. Perfect test case, I figured. Small scope, no crazy requirements.
The Actual Grind: Trying to “Devin-It”
I started by laying out the core functions. Rule number one from Devin (or so I interpreted): if you can write it yourself in a reasonable amount of time, do it. Don’t pull in a library. Okay, challenge accepted.
First up, data storage. Normally, I’d grab a small SQLite wrapper or even just use JSON files with a helper library. But no, Devin’s ghost was whispering “too complex!” So, I ended up writing my own super-simple text file parser. Talk about manual labor. Every little thing, from reading the file line by line, splitting strings, to handling potential errors – all from scratch.
- Reading notes: manual file I/O.
- Saving notes: more manual file I/O, with careful overwrites.
- Searching notes: a basic string matching loop. Super inefficient, but hey, no libraries!
The user interface? Oh boy. I was aiming for a simple command-line tool, so that helped. But even basic input validation, making sure the user typed ‘yes’ and not ‘YESSIR’, became this tedious chain of `if` statements. I remember spending a good couple of hours just trying to get a date input to work reliably without any date parsing libraries. Ended up forcing users to input dates in a `YYYY-MM-DD` format and wrote a regex from scratch to validate it. Fun times.
What I Realized Along The Way
This whole “Michael Devin” thing… it’s a real test of patience. And I mean, a REAL test. My productivity tanked. Tasks that would usually take me an hour with standard tools stretched into days. I was wrestling with basic string manipulations and file operations like it was my first week coding.
And you know what I found out after digging a bit more? A lot of the examples attributed to Devin, the ones that looked so sleek and minimal? They were either super tiny, almost proof-of-concept things, or there were rumors that a whole bunch of custom, unacknowledged helper code was involved. It wasn’t quite the “lone genius with notepad and compiler” image that was painted.
It felt a bit like those survival shows where they make fire with two sticks. Cool to watch, cool to say you tried it, but you wouldn’t want to cook dinner that way every night when you have a perfectly good stove.
So, Was It Worth It?
In a weird way, yeah. I definitely got a much deeper understanding of what those libraries I usually take for granted are doing under the hood. My debugging skills for really low-level problems got a boost, for sure. I can now appreciate a well-written utility function like never before!
But would I build a serious project this way? Absolutely not. It’s just not practical. Time is money, and reinventing the wheel for every single spoke is just… well, it’s a choice. It’s a cool story to tell, I guess. Makes you appreciate the tools we have. And honestly, that’s the biggest takeaway I got from my little dance with the Michael Devin philosophy. Sometimes, simple ain’t easy, and “pure” can be purely painful.
