Alright, let’s talk about this “John Petite” thing. It’s a name that still makes me chuckle, and maybe groan a little, when I think back on it. This wasn’t some fancy new framework or a revolutionary piece of tech, not really. It was more like a… an experiment, I guess you could call it, that one of my old gigs decided to try out. And boy, was it an experience.
It all started when the higher-ups brought in this consultant, an actual guy named John Petite, or at least that’s what we were told his name was. He had this whole philosophy about “ultra-efficient coding” and “minimalist development.” Sounded okay on paper, I suppose. Who doesn’t want efficiency, right? But the way he described it, it started to sound a bit… odd.
So what was this “John Petite Method” all about?
Well, we all got herded into the big conference room. Mr. Petite himself, a small, very serious man with tiny glasses, walked us through his grand vision. The core idea, as far as I could piece it together, was extreme reductionism. We’re talking:
- Functions should do one tiny thing, and I mean TINY. Like, if it was more than five lines of code, you were probably overthinking it, according to him.
- Variable names? Keep ’em short. He actually suggested three or four characters max. His reasoning was it made lines shorter and “less cluttered.” Yeah, okay.
- Comments were apparently for amateurs. “Self-documenting code,” he called it. If your tiny functions and cryptic variable names weren’t clear enough, well, that was on you.
- Files should be small. Lots and lots of tiny files.
The promise was that this would make everything super easy to debug, incredibly fast to write, and a breeze to maintain. Spoiler: it was mostly the opposite.
I remember getting my first assignment under the new “Petite” regime. It was a pretty standard feature, something that would normally take me a day or two, maybe a few well-structured classes. I started breaking it down like he said. And breaking it down. And breaking it down some more. My screen just filled up with tabs for all these minuscule files. It felt like I was building with LEGOs, but only using the tiniest, single-stud pieces for everything. It was just… tedious. You spent more time creating new files and trying to remember what `fn_a1_*` did than actually coding logic.
Then came the debugging. Oh man. Trying to trace a bug through that maze was a nightmare. You’d click through ten different tiny functions, spread across who knows how many files, just to follow a single piece of data. It was like trying to read a choose-your-own-adventure book where every page just said “go to page X.” Productivity just tanked. We were all spending ages trying to make sense of our own, and each other’s, “Petite” code.
The code reviews were something else. People would put up these changes with dozens of tiny files, and you’d just stare at it, trying to connect the dots. It was like, “Okay, I see you changed `var qz = 1;` in `util_p_*`, but what does that actually mean for the user hitting the submit button?” Nobody really knew without spending half a day playing detective.
We tried to make it work, we really did. For a few months, the codebase got more and more fragmented. Onboarding new developers? Forget it. They’d look at this stuff and you could see the confusion, then the quiet despair, wash over their faces. It wasn’t intuitive; it was just a mess, a self-inflicted wound, really.
Eventually, things started to creak. Big time. Small changes would have these weird ripple effects because everything was so hyper-connected in this bizarre, granular way, yet so obscure. Maintenance became a dirty word. The original champion, John Petite himself, was long gone by then, probably off selling his snake oil to some other unsuspecting company.
After about six, maybe seven months of this torture, management kind of… quietly gave up. There was no big announcement saying “The John Petite experiment is over!” We just sort of… stopped. People started writing slightly longer functions. Variable names started making sense again. It was like a collective, unspoken agreement to return to sanity. What a relief, I tell ya.
So, what did I take away from the whole “John Petite” saga? Well, for one, just because someone calls something “simple” or “minimalist” doesn’t mean it actually makes things easier. Sometimes, a bit of sensible structure and clear naming, even if it means a few more lines of code, saves you a whole world of pain down the line. And it really hammered home that you gotta be careful with these silver-bullet solutions, especially when they’re pushed by someone who doesn’t have to stick around to deal with the mess. Always look at the practical side, not just the fancy theory. That’s my two cents, anyway.
