Divide and rule, a strategy known for millennia, from Roman Empire, to Napoleon, to British Empire is not just another military or political technique. It is one of the best tools I have ever used to conquer my enemies - technical and business problems.
You may not realize this, but divide and rule is everywhere around you:
- feature flags & A/B tests,
- extracting part of code to separate function,
- separating concerns (e.g. MVC pattern or per-domain folders),
- ICE scoring and implementing just top of the list,
- ideation / research / design / implementation sequence,
- and many, many more.
These are the good examples. These are the times when you are the emperor utilizing divide and rule.
However, just like fire is good servant but a bad master, we all sometimes become the object of this grand strategy when we:
- allow being distracted from deep focus,
- refuse to communicate, throttling the spread of knowledge,
- accept "while you are looking at that part of the code, why don't you fix this long-standing bug there as well" aka context switching,
- implement feature before giving it a thought,
- trying the same procedure over and over when debugging,
- looking for faulty commit one by one (instead of
git bisect) - don't take apart our challenges into screws (when estimating time or trying to understand the complex concept),
- and the list goes on.
So think about the forces that try to divide you, and come with the ways to divide them instead.
And next time you are stuck on a problem, ask this simple question: how can I divide this problem into smaller parts? It will result in impera.
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