The opposite of Agile

One of the buzzwords I've heard flying around the interwebs these days is "Agile Web development." The term refers to a specific method of web project management, and is basically the antithesis of the more strictly structured Waterfall Model. I had been taught the Waterfall Model in class, but actually used Agile management in my web projects, without even knowing what I was doing had a technical name. Agile Web Development, in my opinion, is just a more natural way of doing things. In my experience, it seems Agile development naturally tends to favor an application with a relational database and some kind of content management system - that way, changes can happen quickly and easily without a catastrophic rewrite of code. But what happens when all that goes out the window?

My portfolio page happens. After searching for days for a quick and dirty plugin for Rails to manage a small photo album, all I was coming up with were fully developed apps for advanced photo galleries. While nice, I needed something that fit into my page nicely, deployed quickly and easily, and still had a little visual flair. Nothing. I started mocking up some code, but then it hit me - I was basically trying to dig a fencepost with a backhoe, and already had a shovel...HTML. As it turns out, I'm going to be updating the page fairly infrequently, and the initial time spent going the Agile route and creating a database-driven CMS was going to far surpass the extra time spent hand-coding HTML each time I updated. I could even get my eye candy with a Rails-based Lightbox called RedBox.

The moral of the story? It's not always good to think like a nerd. While the movie may argue otherwise, I'd like to side with our friend Ogre in the picture - sometimes brute force gets the job done, and makes everyone happier in the process.