My career-related content is now open-source on GitHub.
Thoughts on my personal mantra
Laziness, Impatience and Hubris
🇫🇷 version française
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Really nice article. The part about laziness throws me back to around a decade ago when I answered that as a weakness for an internship and the feedback I got was that I should never use this word on an interview but rather say that I'm proactive or something.
Nowadays I've been reflecting on how my main motivation to get my work done is exactly not having to work and how I could never say that on a job interview.
I'm glad that it resonated with you, thanks for your kind words.
Yes, that's very widespread, LinkedIn is infested by it, that's the cult of toxic positivity.
You wouldn't believe how many grown ups would benefit for watching a Walt Disney movie...
Nice article. I definitely prefer a 'lazy' style of coding. I sometimes know there's a more 'clever' solution to a problem; and sometimes see these implemented when doing code reviews. But often these 'clever' solutions increase complexity/decrease legibility; and are quite often clever just for the sake of it (i.e. provide little, if any, benefit).
Knowing that I - and others - will have to come back and work with that code at some later time I almost always stick to the 'lazy' option. That's easier than having to remind myself how the clever solution works; and in practice saves everyone time and effort.
That's great dialectic. You search the right trade off between two kind of laziness, short term laziness (the clever solution will spare me some work) and long term laziness (I will need to explain to my colleagues and maintain later).
When you think about it, the history of mathematics is the history of laziness. If we weren't lazy, we wouldn't have multiplication, we'd still add up the same term again and again and again. (In fact we wouldn't even have addition because we could just count marbles one by one or something.)
But importantly it's not any kind of laziness, it's laziness coupled with a determination to still achieve the correct result.
Another good example
Bad laziness is minimizing the amount of efforts in the short term
Good laziness is minimizing the amount of efforts in the long term.
Level 10 is where you don’t write any code because the product feature that’s being requested is not what’s actually desired and you nip it in the bud before you start. Sadly, this part usually involves a lot of talking.
Level 11 is when you inform product that what they really want (not what they think they want) is already available by doing X instead.
Then, with product off your back, you can go back to fine tuning and refactoring the spaghetti mess that the last revolving door of devs left you
Absolutely.
Building things right is important, but building the right things is even more important.
I think the Lean Startup has pretty valid insights on this that are too often neglected.
I also prefer a simple and straightforward approach to coding, often referred to as the "lazy" style. The clever solutions may be implemented for the sake of being clever, without providing significant benefits.
As developers, we must consider the fact that we or others may need to come back and work with the code at a later time. Therefore, it is usually better to opt for the lazy option, which is easier to understand and saves time and effort in the long run.
Nice article, just that the french link is dead, possibly from a trailing underscore.
Merci! 🙏🏻
Applause! Clap your (my) hands 👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿❗
Super! I guess it was all I needed to hear!
Before we developer anything, we have to be able to developer ourselves.
I am here to read article and comments and become lazy...
Welcome to the club.
You probably already were the day you choose to become a programmer though :)
In my experience, the virtue of laziness has helped me to avoid repetitive tasks and write more efficient code.
Yes that's exactly why pretty much why the human brain invented lazyness.
Your brain is lazy because it is smart. It doesn't want you to try to catch a fucking insanely fit antilope if that doesn't immediately work. Sure you could get her with robot-like discipline because you sweat better than her. But you would be exhausted too and that's not the point. We are not competing in the olympics. We are trying to get food as easily as possible. Better scan the environment for a better project!
Most of mankind's inventions were motivated by good old laziness!
Truth, the lazy guy is on the left here
Thx for this post!
What a coincidence! Today I got this question
I didn't see this one coming. LOL
LOL, what did you answer?
I often tell my tutoring students that a good programmer is in dialectic tension between OCD and lazy, taking care of every detail but not creating more details than necessary. Of course, that needs to be tempered with best practices: no variable names too short that live too long in too many places, good error checking, validation, error reporting and logging. Lots of seats at the design table: you need to please the customer, tester, next developer, production support, and the end user.