When a customer says that he has a smaller project than the one I just did, don't pay attention, and think about the quote, rather than simply estimating the time as less than the previous project.

Yesterday, I did a project for a friend (one who let me have better access than average to the real estate listings) and it took an hour and a half and was 107 lines of code.  He wanted to pay for that one, but I thought it was a fair exchange for getting the real estate listing access.

Today, I did a "smaller" project, that was 367 lines of code, and it took 3.5 hours. Hrm.

On a related topic, I never understand the estimates that say coders can only do 10 lines of working code a day or whatever they claim.  These projects have 1.1 and 1.8 lines per minute, and they have been reasonably tested with a couple thousand lines of input.

I don't really think it is just that I am some great programmer, but presumably there is reason behind the logic that says coders can't code that fast.

These projects were in PHP, but I have noted similar things in the past in C and when writing assembly language. 

Posted by Jon Daley on March 20, 2008, 9:27 pm | Read 5587 times
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Granted, I haven't coded anything in nigh unto 30 years, but to me, "lines of code per minute" is meaningless. If the project was something familiar I with and not too complicated, I could whip out code very quickly. On the other hand, there were projects where if you factor in all the time spent designing the system, coding was very slow indeed.

Posted by SursumCorda on March 21, 2008, 6:27 am

I believe those numbers include the overhead of time in meetings. In big companies this is significant. I think it also includes bigger projects with multiple participants - which of course take more coordination, and thus more time.

Posted by Dad-o on March 22, 2008, 8:20 am
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