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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

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How can you identify unhealthy perfectionism in your work?

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

It starts to take (time & effort) way more than expected.

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buphmin profile image
buphmin

I'm not sure that works in all scenarios. I find frequently with legacy code even hacky changes can take a lot longer than expected.

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yaser profile image
Yaser Al-Najjar

If it's not worth the extra time and effort, then it lies within the perfection boundaries.

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buphmin profile image
buphmin

Ah there we go. It takes more time/effort than expected AND it is not worth it :)

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dansilcox profile image
Dan Silcox

When people spend longer telling you why something won't work, than making it actually just work would have taken!

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sinewalker profile image
Mike Lockhart

The GitLense heat map shows more edits in comments than in code?

But more seriously, if you have a lot of small commits, could indicate obsessive compulsive edits. I'm guilty of that

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cecilelebleu profile image
Cécile Lebleu

Haha I’m also guilty of that. My solution is making a bunch of small changes and commit all of those as “minor improvements”. This solution is probably worse than the problem itself, though.

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Nick Taylor

Not shipping anything. 😉

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johanneslichtenberger profile image
Johannes Lichtenberger

Yeah ;-)

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phillie profile image
Philly

Simple but true! 😅 #guiltyAsCharged

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mohamedelidrissi_98 profile image
Mohamed ELIDRISSI

I'm in this comment and I don't like it

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ganonbit profile image
Andrew Reese

big oof

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georgecoldham profile image
George

The fact my personal site has taken 6 complete reworks, almost 4 years and still has never actually had more than a coming soon message.

Its just never perfect...

For my actual work, I play the game of bouncing it off testers when I feel its about there. This goes on till they accept it. It stops me over thinking and over working on things.

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cecilelebleu profile image
Cécile Lebleu

About a year ago I started my first version of my website. I used Wordpress so it was up and running in no time, and most of the content was ready. Then a few weeks ago, with new knowledge and tools, I started to remake it from scratch. I had to “start over” from zero 3 times, but now it’s a lot better than it was before and it’s pretty much ready. Not that I won’t keep working on it indefinitely, though.
I like to think, “is this code I have right here better that what’s online? Yes—ship it.” And in my opinion, almost anything is better than a coming soon page! 😉
Good luck on your projects! In case you want to take a look, my site is at cecilelebleu.com. Although it’s not perfect, it’s better than it was yesterday!

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mohamedelidrissi_98 profile image
Mohamed ELIDRISSI

It's not bad actually, I like it

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johanneslichtenberger profile image
Johannes Lichtenberger

I think too many premature performance optimizations, which might not even be optizimations, due to maybe not even Profiling...

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban

It's hard to have self awareness of this, but if you found yourself trying to cover every scenario around the task in hand and make sure you've covered it, it's a sign that you might have fallen in that trap.

I always tell people:

Start small, then iterate and don't overthink your solution

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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

Still plan, but not so far you go out of scope.

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elmuerte profile image
Michiel Hendriks

Depth-first versus Breadth-first development.
With depth first you would make things feature complete before moving on the next part, instead of first getting to a minimal product. Depth first has little YAGNI and a lot of bike shedding.

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JustinKaffenberger

Be careful to not let the opposite mentality take over,

"I just need to focus on not being a perfectionist, and ship it"

With this mentality you will create a codebase that is not flexible, difficult to maintain, and doesn't stand the test of time.

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Hector Minaya

Someone constantly fixed on a scarcity mindset. Always looking for what's missing.