Light on content again today. I’m having a bit of writers block I think. The life is boring but nice, so I don’t have as many existential crises to share with you. As a bit of a carry on to my dialogue last week, I’ve been thinking about the right tool for the job.
I have been wanting to track some stuff I’m working on and I wanted to be able to record a daily log. I spent a week looking at different frameworks and decided what database to use. Then I woke up Saturday morning and absolutely frustrated with myself, I started logging things in a spreadsheet. And my problems were solved. I can keep track of things, use pivot tables if I need more data and write quick charts. Hell eventually I can export it and parse it and put it in a database if I really need to. But do I really need to?
Analogous to this, is that shiny fancy bit of code that you’re super smug about because you figured it out and it’s bitchin’. It may be bitchin’ but it will in fact probably be a bitch for the next person to look the codebase to maintain. By no means should you take the easy way out, but if you are trying to use a slick one-liner in production code that takes a half hour PowerPoint to explain, save it for a blog post. Be kind to your fellow engineers. We’re generally quiet, but we will mentally curse you to the fate of having a problem that’s never been answered on Stack Overflow.