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The caveat is that you might end up shaving a yak. More often than not I end up three or four tasks deep while trying to fix a tiny issue. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_UZFI-8D5uA
You are going to pay it anyway, its not an "if" its a "when"
Engineering is a continual lesson in axe-sharpening (if you have 6 hours to chop down a tree, spend the first 4 sharpening your axe). My favorite framing, from Kent Beck: “first make the change easy, then make the easy change.”
I have mixed feelings here because on one hand I prefer the “axe” when programming (vim with only the right extensions and options). But for trees… chainsaws are quite a bit easier. Once it is chopped down, maybe rent a wood splitter.
Engineering is a continual lesson in axe-sharpening (if you have 6 hours to chop down a tree, spend the first 4 sharpening your axe). My favorite framing, from Kent Beck: “first make the change easy, then make the easy change.”
I recently got assigned to enhance some code I've never seen before. The code was so bad that I'd have to fully understand it and change multiple places to make my enhancement. I decided that if I was going to be doing that anyway, I might as well refactor it into a better state first. It feels so good to make things better instead of just making them do an extra thing.
The caveat is that you might end up shaving a yak. More often than not I end up three or four tasks deep while trying to fix a tiny issue. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_UZFI-8D5uA
Weird. I happen to be watching Malcolm in the Middle and I find a link to Malcolm in the Middle
The caveat is that you might end up shaving a yak. More often than not I end up three or four tasks deep while trying to fix a tiny issue. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_UZFI-8D5uA
There is simply no general recipe for this. Sometimes I put my little tools and libraries in order and then I'm very productive with them and looking back it seems to have been the key enabler to the actual thing getting done. Other times I go dirty mode and just hardcode constants, copy code files under time pressure and looking back it is clear that getting to the same result with the clean approach would have take…
Making messy edits is a bet on previous code quality. If you have paid off enough technical debt, you can take another "technical loan" and expect the rest of the owl to still function despite the mess being introduced. If things are already messy, there's always a risk to make the fess incomprehensible and failing in mysterious seemingly unrelated ways, with the only way to fix it being to git reset --hard to the prior point, and do a more right thing. But the time would have been wasted already.
My approach is usually to timebox it, and cut the losses if an acceptable solution is not yet in sight when the time runs out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
hey, the idea of Krossover is actually dope! my sole question is, why does it exist? I understand that one might call Rust from Kotlin for performance reasons (I do that often, Mozilla does, some others too), but Kotlin from Rust? where would it be useful? no snark or subtext here, I'm genuinely curious
Calling Kotlin from Rust (and other languages) is useful when you want access to an existing Kotlin codebase and would rather avoid creating a full-blown port. I guess most people don't do things like this because creating bindings for languages that are not C (or C-like) is usually cumbersome. Krossover is trying to fill that gap for Kotlin. Does that make sense?
I'm still curious about case studies. I can imagine that something has SDK for Kotlin but not for Rust, yet outside of that case, technical benefits are not yet obvious to me.
I aim for the Boy Scout rule - always leave things better than you found it. It’s always a balance and you have to not lose the forest for the trees. Always ask what is the end goal, and am I still moving forward on that.
The caveat is that you might end up shaving a yak. More often than not I end up three or four tasks deep while trying to fix a tiny issue. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_UZFI-8D5uA
There is simply no general recipe for this. Sometimes I put my little tools and libraries in order and then I'm very productive with them and looking back it seems to have been the key enabler to the actual thing getting done. Other times I go dirty mode and just hardcode constants, copy code files under time pressure and looking back it is clear that getting to the same result with the clean approach would have take…
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