Solve Small Problems

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the Infragistics blog.  Go check out the original at their site.  While you’re there, go check out their developer tools and controls.

It’s fun to think of great moments in the history of science, particularly the ones that have a memorable anecdote attached to them.  In the 3rd century BC, a naked Archimedes ran down a city street, screaming Eureka, because he had discovered, in a flash, how to measure the volume of irregular solids.  In the 1600s, a fateful apple bonks Issac Newton on the head, causing him to spit out the Theory of Gravity.  In the early 1900s, another physicist is sitting around, contemplating the universe, when out pops E=MC^2.

These stories all share two common threads: they’re extremely compelling and entirely apocryphal.  As such, they make for great Disney movies, but not such great documentaries.  Point being, we as humans like stories of “eureka moments” and lightning bolt inspiration much better than tales of preparation, steady work, and getting it right on attempt number 2,944, following 2,943 failed attempts.

But it goes beyond just appreciating the former type of story.  We actually manufacture them.  Perhaps the most famous sort of example was Steve Jobs’ legendarily coy, “oh yeah, there’s one more thing” that preceded the unveiling of some new product or service.  Jobs and Apple were masters of “rabbit from the hat” marketing where they’d reveal some product kept heretofore under wraps as though it were a state secret.  All that is done to create the magic of the grand reveal — the illusion that a solution to some problem just *poof* appeared out of thin air.

Unrealistic Expectations

With all of this cultural momentum behind the idea, it’s easy for us to internalize it.  It’s easy for us to look at these folk stories of scientific and product advancement and to assume that not having ideas or pieces of software fall from us, fully formed and intact, constitutes failure.  What’s wrong with us?  Why can’t we just write that endpoint in one shot, taking into account security, proper API design, backward compatibility, etc?  We’re professionals, right?  How can we be failing at this?

You might think that the worst outcome here is the ‘failure’ and the surrounding feelings of insecurity.  But I would argue that this isn’t the case at all.  Just as the popular stories of those historical scientists are not realistic, and just as Apple didn’t wave a magic wand and wink an iPod Nano into existence, no programmer thinks everything through, codes it up, and gets it all right and bulletproof from the beginning.  It simply doesn’t happen.

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Modern Software Development at Its Core

I spend a lot of time in hotels, so it’s pretty unremarkable that I would spend the first week of 2016 on the 6th floor of some Marriott.  I unpacked and put my things in their usual places.  I make coffee in the room’s coffee-maker the same way each morning.  And I hit the hotel gym each day for a 3-4 mile jog between end of business and going for dinner.  In terms of my routine, the first week in January is like every other week of the year that I’m on the road.

What’s not the same as every other week of the year is what awaits me when I arrive at the hotel gym.  In December, it’s a roomful of softly humming treadmills and a TV firing out staccato bursts of salacious, 24 hour news at a mercifully low volume — the exercise room equivalent of a ghost town.  This week, it’s full of newly New Years-resolved exercisers, armed with old walkmans, weird headbands, and pitted out T-shirts that, until this day, were reserved for painting the house.

A Pitched Battle with a Treadmill

One such man came in at the same time as me, and took the treadmill next to mine.  I punched in my workout settings and started out at my usual 6 miles per hour, while the man next to me fiddled with his treadmill for a few minutes.  Once he got started, he peered at me every few seconds, as if I were taking a midterm via treadmill and he wanted to copy my answers.  He worked himself up to a speed similar to mine, and everything seemed to be in rhythm for 2-3 minutes, until his breathing became extremely labored and ragged.

Naturally, at this point, rather than pausing the treadmill or slowing the speed, he lifted himself off of the belt like a gymnast performing on the parallel bars.  Once this became untenable, he set one foot down on either side of the belt, tottered awkwardly a bit, and then jumped off the treadmill.  I assumed he was done, wanting to live to fight another day, but a few minutes later, he returned with a towel and leapt back onto the treadmill, using his arms to resume his former pace.  Luckily for him, he did then figure out how to adjust his speed, allowing him to alternate between sprinting and walking until he decided he’d had enough.

A lot of gym regulars, as I understand it, find New Years resolvers to be annoying.  I understand this sentiment if you take them as an entire group, seriously clogging up the gym for the first 3-4 weeks of the year.  But it’s hard to fault any individual for wanting to engage in some self improvement and overcoming inertia (and annoyed veterans) to get started.  In fact, it’s downright laudable.

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