Saw that name, y. kawamura, mentioned the other day. Dragged up some old memories, let me tell you. Not exactly fond ones.
I remember this project, maybe five, six years back? We were supposed to follow this specific methodology, apparently championed by this y. kawamura person or group, I don’t even know. Sounded fancy on paper, like it was gonna solve all our problems.
The Grand Plan Meets Reality
So, we kicked things off. First step was just understanding the documentation. That alone took us nearly a week. Seriously. It was written in this super dense, academic style. Like, who talks like that? We were just trying to build a simple feature, not write a PhD thesis.
I grabbed the main spec sheet. Tried reading through it. Gave up. Passed it to Dave on my team. He tried. Came back looking confused. We actually had a meeting, just the two of us, trying to decipher paragraph one. Felt like learning a new language, a really badly designed one.
- We tried mapping their diagrams to our actual system. Didn’t fit.
- We looked for examples. None provided, of course.
- We tried breaking down their ‘core principles’. Mostly just buzzwords.
Hitting the Wall
Then came the actual coding part. Following the ‘Kawamura way’ step-by-step. Let me tell you, it was painful. We wrote code, it felt wrong. Clunky. Inefficient. We’d run into roadblocks that the documentation just completely ignored. Like, basic stuff! How do you handle errors? What about scaling? Silence.
It felt like whoever wrote this stuff never actually built anything real. Just sat in a room and thought deep thoughts. We wasted so much time trying to make it work. Debugging was a nightmare because the logic was so twisted, following their rules.
I remember arguing with my manager about it. He kept saying, “Stick to the plan! It’s the standard!” I tried explaining, “The standard doesn’t work! It’s costing us time!” But you know how it is. He just wanted to tick a box saying we used the ‘y. kawamura’ method.
Doing It Our Way
Eventually, we hit a breaking point. We were falling behind schedule, and the thing we were building was becoming a monster. So, late one evening, me and a couple of the senior guys just decided. We ditched it. Well, not completely. We kept the parts that kinda made sense, maybe like 10%? The rest? We just did it the way we knew worked. Simple, practical code. Stuff we could actually maintain.
We finished the project. It worked. Shipped it. Nobody higher up ever really checked if we followed the ‘y. kawamura’ stuff down to the letter. They got their feature, the box was ticked (sort of), and that was that.
So yeah, y. kawamura. For me, it’s just a reminder of fancy standards that sound good but fall apart when they hit the real world. Learned a good lesson though: trust your gut and your team’s experience over some abstract document any day. You gotta actually build stuff, not just talk about it.
