The last couple of days have been a mix of professional pragmatism and a fun side-quest helping a friend. It’s a good reminder that sometimes the best move is to not build something, while other times, it’s about rolling up your sleeves to build from the ground up.
At work, a proactive new colleague in OpEx is improving our 5S process. We were about to build a system to automatically generate a complex progress graph from a massive Excel file. It felt like a lot of effort, so I pushed back with a simple question: does anyone actually need this? After talking to a few managers, the answer was a clear no. We saved ourselves a ton of development time by deciding to just copy-paste the graph quarterly. It’s a huge win for keeping things simple.
Here are a few highlights from the last couple of days:
- Challenging requirements is key. We avoided building a complex, time-consuming feature by validating its necessity with the actual users first. A simple conversation saved us days of work.
- Paying technical debt is a grind. I’m continuing to write tests for our video analysis project to enable safe refactoring. It’s slow, painstaking work that highlights the cost of starting a project without a solid testing foundation. A lesson learned the hard way.
- Mentoring is incredibly rewarding. I was supposed to be on a sick day but ended up helping a friend set up his business domain, connect his professional email, and brainstorm his tech and business strategy. He offered to pay, but just helping him get started was payment enough.
- Building from a clean slate feels great. After wrestling with the messy codebase at work, helping my friend build his website and story from scratch was a breath of fresh air. We got a nice site up, clarified his offerings, and talked about how he can showcase his skills to clients.
Reflection
It’s been a lesson in contrasts. At work, we made the right call to avoid a complex feature, but I’m simultaneously feeling the pain of not having a solid foundation on another project. Then, helping my friend was a powerful reminder of how satisfying it is to build things the right way from day one. It’s all part of the learning process.
Next: More refactoring and test writing for the video analysis project.
Tags: testing, refactoring, project management, mentorship, developer life
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