TAAW

Thank you, perl* for that most useful phrase, There’s Always Another Way. It was another rough week. The solution I had intended was just not working. We did some tweaks and it was still crashing. Still more tweaks still more crashes. Late last night, before it got too early in the morning, I gave up and went to sleep. Sure enough, I woke up early with an idea.

Just because you have picked out a solution doesn’t mean you have to stick with it. Yes, your great ego=-inflated developer brain doesn’t want to give up, but when you’re facing a real deadline, something has to give. You can either pitch out the original idea and try something different, or you run away screaming. Happily I chose door one.

Yes. sometimes that means scrapping a bunch of code and rewriting vast swathes of architecture. Honestly, by the time you get to that point, chances are good that a rewrite is going to be immensely faster than trying to force the original direction. When you’re stressed out and so neck deep in the problem that you start dreaming about it, you can consider letting your back brain chew on the idea for a little bit to see what wild ideas it comes up with.

No, you should change course every time you hit something that’s a little harder than you expect. If you’re afraid to learn a few things on the fly, and admit that you need to learn them, them you should probably consider a different career. In this case, I found a much simpler solution that will meet our needs in the scope of this project. But I also have another topic (complexities around Grand Dispatch) to dig into later.

*Perl, the language. It’s a clever and fiendish little language best used for projects that can be thrown away rather than maintained. Have you heard Scalzi’s bit about the failure mode of clever is asshole? Yeah, it applies in coding too. But it’s a fun little language and worth at least taking a look at if you’ve never played with it.