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The title "Stop trying to make hard work easy" resonates with me. And is closely related to [1] Yak Shaving and [2] Premature Optimisation. What I always seem
by gitgud 6y ago
The title "Stop trying to make hard work easy" resonates with me. And is closely related to [1] Yak Shaving and [2] Premature Optimisation.
What I always seem to forget is that; Making the hard work easy has diminishing returns.
For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click, how many websites do I have to deploy before it's worth doing?
Of course it depends, but usually it's important to work on the problem that matters, not the meta problem.
[1] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving
[2] https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization
- baxtr 6y ago> For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click, how many websites do I have to deploy before it's worth doing? There is of course a xkcd for that: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
- mikeyjk 6y agoAlso this one: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/ When solving the meta problem goes awry :P I think there's definitely a time and a place for the problem vs the meta problem.
- marcosdumay 6y agoIt's way more complicated than that. Now that deploying a website is 1 click, what kinds of mistakes go away, what other processes you can integrate with that deploy, and what is the gain of deploying more often? For the specific case of deployment, just by the chance of error, I would say it's already above break-even on the first deployment.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago> For example; If I spend 10 hours making a website deployable in 1 click, how many websites do I have to deploy before it's worth doing? How many times do you need to deploy a website? At certain stages of development, probably many times a day. Automating it would not only pay for itself in few days, it also enables CI/CD and a whole new category of tests to be run.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- thom 6y agoThere's actually a nice treatment of this elsewhere on wiki: https://wiki.c2.com/?SharpenTheSaw https://wiki.c2.com/?SharpenTheSaw
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoMy favorite illustration of this, is a humorous story that I think actually started in the late 1980s, called "The Parable of the Toaster": http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheParableOfTheToaster.html http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheParableOfTheToaster.html