Alright, let’s talk about this Ignacio Ramos thing I tried out a while back. Heard the name buzzing around, mostly about some specific workflow or approach he championed. Can’t even remember where I first picked it up, maybe some forum thread or a colleague mentioned it offhand. Sounded interesting enough, different from the usual stuff, so I thought I’d give it a whirl on a small project I had simmering.
Getting Started with the Ramos Idea
So, the core idea, as I understood it from the bits and pieces I gathered, was about stripping down the initial planning phase. Like, really bare bones. Instead of detailed mockups and endless requirement docs, Ramos apparently advocated for just getting the basic structure up and running, almost immediately. Focus on the core function, he supposedly said, and let the rest evolve organically. Seemed a bit chaotic, honestly, but my project was dragging, so I figured, what the heck.
I decided to apply this to redesigning my personal blog. Usually, I’d spend ages in Figma, map out every user journey, debate fonts for days. This time, I just opened my code editor.
Here’s roughly what I did:
- Picked a super basic template structure.
- Got the main navigation links working, pointing nowhere useful yet.
- Set up the basic blog post display, pulling in dummy text.
- Ignored styling almost completely, just basic readability.
The goal was just to have something clickable, something functional, within the first day or two. It felt weirdly liberating at first, not being bogged down by pixel-perfect designs. Just code, code, code.
Hitting the Snags
Okay, the “honeymoon” phase didn’t last long. Pretty quickly, I realized why people do more upfront planning. I started adding a feature, say, a search bar. But because I hadn’t thought through the overall layout much, figuring out where it should logically go, and how it should look without clashing with future elements I hadn’t even considered yet… well, it got messy.
I found myself doing a lot of backtracking. Code I wrote one day got ripped out the next because it didn’t fit with a new idea I had for another section. The “organic evolution” felt more like random mutations, and not always the good kind. It was like building a house starting with the roof tiles and then wondering how to fit the walls underneath.
There was this constant feeling of patching things up, rather than building on a solid foundation. Sure, I had something functional quickly, but was it the right something? Hard to tell. I spent more time refactoring basic structural stuff than I probably would have if I’d just sketched it out on paper for an hour first.
Final Thoughts on This Approach
So, I did eventually finish the blog redesign. It works. But looking back, I’m not sure the “Ramos way,” or at least my interpretation of it, saved me any real time or effort. It just shifted the workload around. Less time planning, sure, but much more time fixing, refactoring, and dealing with self-inflicted complexity later on.
Maybe it works for certain types of projects, or for people like Ignacio Ramos himself, who perhaps have a very clear vision intrinsically from the start. But for me, on that project? It felt like skipping leg day. You might feel faster initially, but you pay for it later. I think I’ll stick to a bit more planning next time. Not analysis paralysis, but definitely more than just jumping straight into the deep end with code.
