In just about every job there are philosophies people follow when they approach their work. It occurred to me that developers fall into the same categories as the our friends the Three Little Pigs.

The Hacker

This little pig loves to get stuff out fast. He hates structure, documentation and often works best by himself. He puts off any re-factoring and leaves a mess for future developers to clean up but on the surface appears fun and fast. Executives love this guy.

The pragmatist

This little pig understands time constraints as well as the value of delivering some quality. It pains him to let product out the door with less quality but knows the business needs to focus on time to market. He builds for scale but not to the moon. His code is generally clean. He believes in light documentation for future little pigs who follow.

Th Purist

This little pig needs to have everything done “the right way” (whether or not he truly understands what that means is irrelevant). Everything needs to be designed and documented before he’ll start anything. He believes in preparing everything for scale. (even without evidence the product will need to scale). He’s often late with his projects but the final product is very high quality.

So what kind of pig are you?