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Damn, yeah. Same here. That little voice of "is this really the BEST way" has grown stronger and stronger over the years, and I kinda have to fight it back to "

Damn, yeah. Same here. That little voice of "is this really the BEST way" has grown stronger and stronger over the years, and I kinda have to fight it back to "allow" myself to do little hacky projects like this. I always wanted to be better at software engineering, and software design, and getting abstractions right, and all that stuff. I've slowly gotten better at all that, but I didn't know it would come with the tradeoff of being unable to switch it off.

luigi23 8y ago
Probably thats why many programmers have many great ideas but fails to come into reality. They cannot gain any fun from side project since they automatically want to ‘learn’ new framework, language, etc. Instead of messing around and looking how their idea grows into something fun. Its about having fun from creating, not from learning the proper way since beginning. Its clear when you tell your friends about your new idea - they would say ‘oh thats sounds cool!’, but when I tell the same to my programming friends I would rather hear ‘you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem, so it doesnt make sense’
- sixdimensional 8y ago
  IMHO, after enough years, it becomes less about wanting to learn the new framework etc. and more about wanting to actually accomplish a specific thing. Put in another way of saying it, when you get tired of the constant pace of change of our toolsets, it becomes more about the problem and solution rather than the specific tool you use to solve it. Don't get me wrong.. I still do love learning all the latest and greatest, and keeping my hands on the tools. But over time, after a long time of getting distracted (or even disrupted by the "need" to keep learning new stuff), I feel at least that it can get tiring and to the point of interrupting any actual productive labor towards a bigger goal. So I agree with you.
  - i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
    You nailed it. It stops being 'wanting to' and starts being 'having to' and that is a subtle inflection point in an engineers life.
HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
That ability to switch it off is very important. A couple months ago, one of my co-workers was asked to do something quickly for an important customer. I would normally be the one to work on that codebase, but I was busy with something else. I gave him some suggestions, made it completely, crystal clear that hacks were allowed since the customer needed it by the next day at the latest and it only had to run for a few hours and we could use the excuse that it wasn't under version control if they wanted changes later. He's a very good engineer and this was well within his ability, but he became hamstrung by the hackiness. He continually complained that it would be unsupportable (I know), that he would be asked to make changes (no: this was explicitly part of the agreement with the customer) and it was a bad design decision (yes!). By the time 4 o'clock rolled around, he had made little progress on his well engineered and future-proof solution and I didn't want to be there late, so I offered to take it from him, finished the hack by 4:30 and pushed it to the customer. Customer loved it; greatly appreciated that "we had dropped all our work to put two engineers on their project" and it did exactly what they needed to demo their own product. I guess my point is that engineering is about getting stuff done. Sometimes, if you know time is more important than anything else, your only choice is either cut corners or don't ship. Being a day late can be the same thing as never shipping in some cases.
- satsuma 8y ago
  it's one of the biggest weaknesses that engineers/programmers/logical, problem-oriented thinkers have. doing something quick and hacky when it doesn't need to be flawless just feels so wrong. you miss that feeling, that rush when a perfectly-engineered solution just snaps into place and works like magic. and that becomes a problem when it begins to interfere with deadlines, like in your story. i think that's a big part of programming as a career, learning to know when to make something run flawlessly, and when to make it just... run.
  - drb91 8y ago
    Ehh, the problem here seems to be less about logic and more about misaligned priorities in the context of business. There’s a lot to be said about the dopamine rush of making a client happy!
madeofpalk 8y ago
Switching it off is how you learn to switch it on better. I started a react project a few years ago and opted against Redux and whatnot. As the project grew and grew it became harder to maintain. Piece by piece, I self identified a 'best practice' that would solve a real problem I had.
- dceddia 8y ago
  Yeah, fwiw, I am pretty good at avoiding too many shiny toys (though this project might not be a good example of that). I'm all about using React without Redux when it makes sense, and especially at the beginning of a project. Heck, I wrote a whole book teaching React that way, and it's how I learned it myself. Wanting to use the "best practice" libraries is a different angle than what I meant though, which was more like a background thread running in my mind about how I should be refactoring things as I go. Two sides of the same coin though, in a lot of respects.

luigi23 8y ago

Probably thats why many programmers have many great ideas but fails to come into reality. They cannot gain any fun from side project since they automatically want to ‘learn’ new framework, language, etc. Instead of messing around and looking how their idea grows into something fun. Its about having fun from creating, not from learning the proper way since beginning. Its clear when you tell your friends about your new idea - they would say ‘oh thats sounds cool!’, but when I tell the same to my programming friends I would rather hear ‘you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem, so it doesnt make sense’

sixdimensional 8y ago
IMHO, after enough years, it becomes less about wanting to learn the new framework etc. and more about wanting to actually accomplish a specific thing. Put in another way of saying it, when you get tired of the constant pace of change of our toolsets, it becomes more about the problem and solution rather than the specific tool you use to solve it. Don't get me wrong.. I still do love learning all the latest and greatest, and keeping my hands on the tools. But over time, after a long time of getting distracted (or even disrupted by the "need" to keep learning new stuff), I feel at least that it can get tiring and to the point of interrupting any actual productive labor towards a bigger goal. So I agree with you.
- i_made_a_booboo 8y ago
  You nailed it. It stops being 'wanting to' and starts being 'having to' and that is a subtle inflection point in an engineers life.

HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago

That ability to switch it off is very important. A couple months ago, one of my co-workers was asked to do something quickly for an important customer. I would normally be the one to work on that codebase, but I was busy with something else. I gave him some suggestions, made it completely, crystal clear that hacks were allowed since the customer needed it by the next day at the latest and it only had to run for a few hours and we could use the excuse that it wasn't under version control if they wanted changes later. He's a very good engineer and this was well within his ability, but he became hamstrung by the hackiness. He continually complained that it would be unsupportable (I know), that he would be asked to make changes (no: this was explicitly part of the agreement with the customer) and it was a bad design decision (yes!). By the time 4 o'clock rolled around, he had made little progress on his well engineered and future-proof solution and I didn't want to be there late, so I offered to take it from him, finished the hack by 4:30 and pushed it to the customer. Customer loved it; greatly appreciated that "we had dropped all our work to put two engineers on their project" and it did exactly what they needed to demo their own product. I guess my point is that engineering is about getting stuff done. Sometimes, if you know time is more important than anything else, your only choice is either cut corners or don't ship. Being a day late can be the same thing as never shipping in some cases.

satsuma 8y ago
it's one of the biggest weaknesses that engineers/programmers/logical, problem-oriented thinkers have. doing something quick and hacky when it doesn't need to be flawless just feels so wrong. you miss that feeling, that rush when a perfectly-engineered solution just snaps into place and works like magic. and that becomes a problem when it begins to interfere with deadlines, like in your story. i think that's a big part of programming as a career, learning to know when to make something run flawlessly, and when to make it just... run.
- drb91 8y ago
  Ehh, the problem here seems to be less about logic and more about misaligned priorities in the context of business. There’s a lot to be said about the dopamine rush of making a client happy!

madeofpalk 8y ago

Switching it off is how you learn to switch it on better. I started a react project a few years ago and opted against Redux and whatnot. As the project grew and grew it became harder to maintain. Piece by piece, I self identified a 'best practice' that would solve a real problem I had.

dceddia 8y ago
Yeah, fwiw, I am pretty good at avoiding too many shiny toys (though this project might not be a good example of that). I'm all about using React without Redux when it makes sense, and especially at the beginning of a project. Heck, I wrote a whole book teaching React that way, and it's how I learned it myself. Wanting to use the "best practice" libraries is a different angle than what I meant though, which was more like a background thread running in my mind about how I should be refactoring things as I go. Two sides of the same coin though, in a lot of respects.