Jun

You need both taste and judgement. You need taste to know what is good, and you need judgement to understand the price of quality. If you ask a model for a component or migration plan, it will create a lot of options, very quickly. Most of those drafts seem OK. So once you have a collection of work that meets the basic criteria, you can no longer use taste to select between them. You must choose. I like to think of this as two filters. There is the taste, and there is the judgement. And I think a lot of people mix those up. The first filter is taste. Taste is the feeling for what makes a thing good. Taste is that feeling you get first, before you're able to put into words what is good or bad about something. You've had that experience where something is bad but you're not sure why, until you've worked it through and can describe it. "This user experience was really clumsy" or "that error message was really aggravating." Taste is built up by experience and practice. It comes from looking at a lot of things, and making a lot of things, and remembering the good bits. Kant's great insight into aesthetic taste was that you could appreciate the form, without having a stake in the outcome. Engineers care about the outcomes much more than the forms, but the feeling is the same. Taste can disqualify a lot. It can disqualify 90% of drafts very quickly. But it's not enough to make a decision between the few remaining options. The second filter is judgement. Judgement is understanding the price of quality. The most perfect solution may not be finished by the time that you need it. The sanest architecture may require the users to migrate while you're in the middle of the final upgrade. Judgement is the understanding of what you give up in time and risk to get good things, for the sake of the users, for the sake of the team. Judgement is made from domain knowledge and experience from previous decisions. People with great taste but poor judgement make beautiful work too late. They make the right thing at the wrong time, or the wrong thing at the right time. People with judgement but no taste make on time but don't make things people love. Both taste and judgement are essential. Filter to a few options with taste, and filter to one option for delivery with judgement.