Friday, September 06, 2013

When You Know Better, Code Better (In the meantime, code it the best you know how at the moment)

There is a good, albeit very short, article on Lifehacker titled "When You Know Better, Do Better". The important take of the article is actuall the message "Do the best you can with what you know now".

There is always a better way to do anything. If we got preoccupied wondering if this is the best we can do right now we'll get paralyzed and nothing will get done. Even worse, when we finally decide to take action anyway, we might take less optimal approach due to self-doubts.

I think this is even more apparent in programming world. There are literally thousands of choices available for us to solve a programming problem. From libraries, frameworks, patterns, languages, text editor, diagram tools, we will probably won't do our best work if we agonize over what is the best that is available.

Referring to the advice above, we could focus our search for the best on what we know already at that time. We will learn new things along the way and at later moment we can do our best again with our knowledge at that time and repeat. I find this quite liberating and help a lot to minimize the noise on the head while coding. I can focus to produce the best work with what I know at the time. I'll do better when I know better.

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