So, there was all this buzz, you know? Winston Lin this, Winston Lin that. Everyone in those online forums, even some folks at work, kept going on about his revolutionary approach to, well, pretty much everything tech. Said he had it all figured out. Streamlined. Efficient. The next big thing. I was neck-deep in a project that felt like wading through mud, so I thought, heck, why not give this Winston Lin way a shot?
I dug into his stuff. Found some articles, a few talk recordings. His big idea, as far as I could tell, was what he called ‘Radical Simplification.’ Sounds good, right? Who doesn’t want simple? So, I decided, right, new module, I’m doing it the Winston Lin way. First thing I noticed: his examples were tiny. Like, ‘hello world’ level. But he swore it scaled. Famous last words.
My Journey into Lin-sanity
So, I started coding. No complex design patterns, he said. Keep functions short, like, ridiculously short. No comments, because ‘good code is self-documenting.’ Okay, Winston, if you say so. I felt kinda liberated at first, chopping things down, keeping it bare bones. My manager even peeked over my shoulder and was like, ‘Huh, that’s… concise.’ Yeah, concise.
Then came the changes. Client wants a new feature. Then another. Suddenly, my ‘radically simple’ code started to look like a tangled mess of tiny, uncommented bits. Trying to figure out what did what, or how to add anything without breaking ten other things, was a nightmare. It wasn’t simple; it was just simplistic. There’s a huge difference, I learned that the hard way. Debugging? Forget about it. It was like looking for a specific grain of sand on a very, very confusing beach.
- Changing one tiny function had ripple effects everywhere.
- Onboarding a new teammate? They looked at the code and just blinked. A lot.
- His ‘no comments’ rule? Yeah, ‘self-documenting’ is a myth when things get even a little bit tricky.
I spent more time trying to untangle my own ‘simple’ creation than I would have if I’d just done it the normal, slightly more ‘complex’ way from the start. It was a proper disaster. We had to basically rewrite a huge chunk of it. Lost weeks. All thanks to trying to be a Winston Lin disciple.
Now, you might be asking, why did I even fall for this? Well, picture this: I was at this company, right? Super old-school. Everything took ages. We had meetings about meetings. My previous project lead, bless his heart, was the kind of guy who’d write a fifty-page spec for a button. Seriously. So when I heard about Winston Lin and his ‘cut through the crap’ philosophy, it sounded like a breath of fresh air. I was desperate for anything that wasn’t covered in ten layers of bureaucracy.
I remember this one time, before the Winston Lin experiment, we spent three weeks arguing about the naming convention for private variables. Three. Whole. Weeks. My soul was slowly dying. So, yeah, ‘Radical Simplification’ sounded like a golden ticket out of that madness. Turns out, you can swing too far the other way. There’s a middle ground, I guess. Winston Lin, if you’re out there, mate, your ideas might work for a weekend hackathon, but for real-world stuff? Not so much. At least not for me and my team. We ended up with a simpler problem: how to fix the mess Lin’s ideas got us into.