Alright, so this whole Kyle Coker thing. You hear his name bandied about, right? Like he’s got some secret sauce for, I dunno, coding purity or something.
They say his approach is all super minimal. Like, take whatever you’re doing and strip it down to the bare bones. Less code, less fuss, less everything. Sounds good on paper, doesn’t it?
My Own Little Experiment
So, I thought, okay, let’s give this a whirl. Got a little side project, nothing too crazy, just a little utility I was hacking on. Decided to go full ‘Coker’ on it. Here’s what I did, or tried to do:
- Ripped out almost every library I usually lean on. Figured, if it’s minimal, it’s gotta be vanilla everything.
- Tried to make functions tiny. Like, super tiny. Each one doing just one microscopic thing.
- Avoided comments like the plague, ’cause, you know, ‘self-documenting code’ and all that jazz he supposedly championed.
And boy, oh boy. What a ride that was. My ‘simple’ utility? It ballooned in a different way. The sheer amount of tiny functions I had to keep track of! And yeah, no libraries meant writing a ton of stuff from scratch that, frankly, others have already perfected and tested.
It worked, in the end. Kinda. But it felt brittle. And if I look at that code in six months? Good luck to me. It’s like one of those minimalist houses – looks cool in a magazine, but try living in it with, like, actual stuff you own.
The Real Deal with These ‘Gurus’
Thing is, with these legendary figures, their methods often come from a very specific time, a very specific set of problems they were solving. It’s not always a one-size-fits-all magic bullet. What worked for Kyle Coker in his basement in 1998, or whatever, might not be the best thing for your team project in 2024.
And how do I have such strong opinions on this, you ask? Funny story, actually.
There was this period, a couple of years back, I was looking for a new gig. Landed an interview at this small, kinda niche software shop. The CTO there, total Kyle Coker disciple. Worshipped the ground the guy digitally walked on. He showed me their main product’s codebase, beaming with pride. “Pure Coker,” he called it.
And it was… something. Files with hardly any lines, but you had to jump through ten of ’em to figure out a single workflow. I saw the junior devs in the corner, man, they looked stressed. Heard later they had a hell of a time onboarding anyone new because the ‘Coker philosophy’ was so ingrained and, frankly, undocumented beyond the code itself. They spent more time deciphering than doing.
I didn’t get that job. He said my approach to a test problem was too ‘verbose’, not ‘Coker-esque’ enough. Honestly, felt like I dodged a massive headache. Gave me a good story, though, and a healthy dose of skepticism about blindly following any single guru, no matter how clean their code supposedly looks in a snippet online.
