Josh Sharp design and development. Web pages with purpose.

Sometimes it might seem like what your manager wants you to do, and what you wish you could do, are two different things. You, as the shining pinnacle of developerness that you are, would like to satisfy your client's requirements by developing a generic solution that fits, but can also scale up, down, and sideways depending on the scenario. But this isn't what your manager wants to hear.

By the way, this isn't aimed at my manager, or anyone I know — just an attempt to explain a programmer's thought processes.

Let's take an example. Say your web application needs to allow admins to create a tree stucture of users, assigning them to groups and sub-groups. Each user will be two levels deep, in a subgroup.

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