Fix your tools
ochagavia.nl
ochagavia.nl
More often than not I end up three or four tasks deep while trying to fix a tiny issue.
Not that you can't get one into a non-working state, that is, of course, trivial but with the lone exception of deleting data, you can always restore a computer, the only tool being needed is some kind of boot disk.
(Compare that to breaking a literal hammer, you'd need a pretty specialized set of tools handy if you wanted to actually restore it)
I know some are tired of AI discourse, but I found AI can help to sharpen the tools but at the same time I find that my scope grows such that dealing with the tools takes just as much time but the tools have more features "just in case" and support platforms or use cases that I won't often need, but it feels easy enough to just do, but then as I said it still takes long in total.
It's all mostly an emotional procrastination issue underneath it. Though that can go both ways. Sometimes you procrastinate on thinking about the overall architecture in favor of just making messy edits because thinking about the overall problem is more taxing than just doing a small iteration, sometimes you procrastinate on getting the thing done in favor of working on more tightly scoped neat little tools that are easier to keep in mind than the vague and sprawling overall goals.
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.
Manager finally got fed up (yes, he was the biggest offender lol) and we organized the whole shop. Gave every tool a specific place. Required tools to be put back. But it actually became easier to put back because everything had a home and we made it so their home was accessible (that's the trick).
Took us like a week to do and it's one of those things that seemed useless. But no one had any doubts of the effectiveness of this because it'd be really difficult to argue that we didn't each spend more than a week (over a year) searching for things. Not only that, it led to fewer lost and broken tools. It also just made people less frustrated and led to fewer arguments. Maybe most important of all, when there was an emergency we were able to act much faster.
So that's changed my view on organizing. It's definitely a thing that's easy to dismiss and not obviously worth the investment but even in just a year there's probably a single event that is solved faster due to the organization. The problem is you have to value the money you would have lost were you not organized. It's invisible and thus easy to dismiss. It's easier because everything else seems so important. But there's always enough time to do things twice and never enough time to do it right.
You are going to pay it anyway, its not an "if" its a "when"
It's a popular theme in corporate culture to avoid initiative, because you may be then made responsible. You can become responsible first on your own terms instead.
Some explanations of yak shaving split it into a complex form of procrastination and also necessary annoyances - friction - obstacles.
Sharpen your Tools often falls into the latter category, and it's always useful to question whether those 'necessary annoyances' are actually necessary.
It is, like you say, not always necessary to tackle those annoyances right now. But it is a situation where both the Campsite Rule and the Rule of Three have some domain. As a person whose entire job is about writing code to replace tedious and error-prone human tasks, you need to interrogate yourself any time you start thinking, "This is my life now." Because if anyone has the power to say 'no', it's us.
It's always worth spending 12-15 minutes most times you do a task that you have to do over and over again in service of trying to reduce the task from ten minutes to five or to zero. The reward for engaging in the task more fully rather than putting it off until it has to be done is that you're working toward a day when maybe you don't have to do it at all (you've automated it entirely or you've made it straightforward enough to delegate).
Hal's example is so funny because he's using both arms to scoop in everything from Column A and Column B at the same time. Everybody gets a laugh. A couple of those tasks actually had to be done. A couple could have gone on the shopping list.
For example, I want to use ES6 modules on my website, then esbuild to compile them. However masonry.js breaks it, and instead of fixing it, I decided to get rid of it, but that breaks the layout of the /guides page, and while I'm there I might as well reorganise the list of guides.
So now I'm on week 2 of the switch to ES6, but I ended up redesigning a page, writing a bunch of tests, fixing unrelated UI bugs, making a few UX fixes, making changes to the static site generator, etc etc.
I get to do that because I'm self-employed and thinking long-term, but if I was at $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER doing sprints, my boss would be wondering why I spent an entire sprint on this simple task.
What do you mean "degenerated"? The term was always a synonym for procrastination and slacking off. It's just that in some cases the procrastinator/slacker argued otherwise.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210112174206/http://projects.c...
Yes, it's about procrastination, but not of the task at hand. You procrastinate in some older task that's really blocking what you need to do now.
It's chain procrastination. Oldest task blocks older task that blocks old task that blocks current task. It's evil because it overflows the task planning buffer. Also you get used to say nah when you start to think in a task in that general direction.
Maybe you should shave the fricking yak already. Or maybe you should use fake yak hair, idk.
Sometimes when you get to the bottom you discover a shorter route backup to the top. The trap is that since you “already wrote the code” is seems a shame to delete it. But that code hasn’t been reviewed or vetted and “code is not the bottleneck”. You really do want to delete it because there’s a new version that’s 1/3 the code, and touches less of the existing system, and so will take less work to review and vet.
What do you think a “causal relation[ship]” means? It means need, not avoidant behavior.
The example with Hal is funny, repeatable (I share it frequently), but also the tasks are (mostly) independent. It feels more like my ADHD. They're things that need to get done, easy to put off/triage, and but make doing other tasks difficult so maybe they actually shouldn't be put off?
But there's also the classic example we're doing something is a bigger rabbit hole than expected. Usually because we were too naïve and oversimplified the problem. An old manager gave me a good rule of thumb: however long you think something is going to take, multiply it by 3. Honestly I think that number is too low and most people miss the mark. I'm pretty sure he stole it from Scotty from Star Trek but forgot that even that is fantasy.
Personal I think you have to be careful about putting off the little things. It's a million times easier to solve little problems than big ones. So you have to remember that just because it's a little problem now doesn't mean it'll grow. The danger is that it's little, so you forget about it. The shitty part is that if you tell you boss they get upset at you if you solve it now but you look like a genius if you solve it after it festers. Invisible work...
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/99114/source-of-sc...
My favorite framing, from Kent Beck: “first make the change easy, then make the easy change.”
What are the incentives for these developers? Most businesses want trees on trucks. That’s the only box they care to check. There is no box for doing it with a sharp axe. You might care, and take the time to sharpen all the axes. Everyone will love it, you might get a pat on the back and a round of applause, but you didn’t check any boxes for the business. Everyone will proceed to go through all the axes until they are dull, and keeping chopping anyway.
I see 2 year old projects that are considered legacy systems. They have an insurmountable amount of technical debt. No one can touch anything without breaking half a dozen others. Everyone who worked on it gets reasonable rewarded for shipping a product, and they just move on. The business got its initial boxes checked and everyone who was looking for a promotion got it. What other incentives are there?
I don't think every company is like this though. E.g. Google and Amazon obviously have spent a mountain of time sharpening their own axes. Amazon even made an axe so sharp they could sell it to half the world.
I think part of the problem is people get... I guess "speed blindness". When stuff is taking ages they just think that's how long it takes. They don't realise that they could be twice as fast if they spent some of their time fixing & improving their tooling.
So they never make the change easy because every change is easy to them... until the lack of structure and re-use makes any further changes almost impossible.
The "make the change easy first" mindset requires understanding what already exists, which is fundamentally a compression/abstraction task. Current models are biased toward generation over refactoring because generating new code has a clearer reward signal than improving existing structure. Until that changes, the human still needs to be the one saying "stop, let's restructure this first."
In my experience you're going to want a sharp axe later in the process, once you've dulled it.
Not sure if that ruins the analogy or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compens...
Sometimes sharpening the axe means breaking it completely for people still trying to cut down trees on WinXP, but you don't know that because you can't run those tests yourself, and grovelling through old logs shows nobody else has either since 2017 so it's probably no big deal.
Sometimes it's not clear which part is actually the cutting blade, and you spend a long time sharpening something else. (If you're really unlucky: the handle.)
I write a bunch of my code on Linux with Clio and for the last several years that "tool" has gotten buggier abd buggier. Sometimes there's a similar issue with breakpoints not breaking.
But I just can't be bothered anymore. If something doesn't work out of the box it doesn't work and I simply move on and find another way around the issue. Life's too short to fix other people's code too.
Kenneth Stanley's book "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective" is dedicated to this phenomenon
Excellent follow-up advice: now stop fixing your tools, and go fix your actual problem instead. I try to follow it in my daily work, with noticeably less success.
You're welcome.
That line links to the commit, which adds
.withDebug(true)
My question is:
Why can the software choose whether, when I run a debugger on it, the debugger will work?
It can't, of course, so what's going on?
I’d also like to know the answer to your question about what is going on. I know Java and maven but not kotlin or gradle, but wouldn’t a debugger be interfacing more at the JVM level?
https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/test_kit.html#sub:...
I'm not completely against debuggers, but in my experience they only are useful either to get the trace of the problem when it first occurs and then use static analysis until you have a theory the debugger can prove/disprove - but only prove/disprove that theory don't keep looking: you will feel productive but in fact be spinning circles
Measure of progress for me is formulating and answering questions. Sometimes trying to answer a question leads to formulating sub questions.
Times when I was more familiar with the program or there were fewer variables to track it was less helpful
In practice it's pretty difficult to find the balance between yak shaving and piling in unnecessary manual labour by just trying to do the work with existing (possibly poorly fitting) tools.
If you're planning to stick with your current tools for a long time, each 1% improvement compounds massively over time, so that balance is probably much closer to yak shaving than most people might realise.
> "A good programmer, when encountering a debugger bug," he paused, cleared his throat, and said solemnly: "should immediately drop the program they're debugging and start debugging the debugger instead!" The auditorium once again erupted in thunderous applause.
Btw I didn't mention it in the blog post, because I think that would have derailed the conversation (after all, the point of the article is not "use LLMs", but "fix your tools"). In any case, I agree that LLMs can make it easier to fix the tools without getting side-tracked.
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
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.