In one of his speeches, Obama said "Better is good". I think about this a lot. It feels like better compounds over time, too. Small improvements add up. From experience, nothing new is perfect the first go round, so sitting around trying to come up with a perfect design is counterproductive because there's no such thing.

"impediment to action advances action. what stands in the way, becomes the way".

▲ zoogeny 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A saying I've come across is: "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good"

I had a coworker who would always be diplomatic about code changes he felt could be improved but when he felt he was nitpicking, where he would say: It's better than it was. It allowed him to provide criticism while also giving permission to go ahead even if there were minor things that weren't perfect. I strongly endorse this kind of attitude.

▲ flutas 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hmm, in every team I've been in (only 3 tbf) we almost all followed the "nit" approach for PRs.

    nit: this could be changed to XYZ

    we should use XYZ here

where it was understood nits could be ignored if you didn't feel it was an urgent thing vs a preference.

	▲	zoogeny 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's worth noting that this is a kind of different "nit" than something that might be attached to a line of code. Like, someone might "nit" using a bunch of if statements where a switch statement might work, or if someone uses a `for each` where a `thing.map` would do. What I am describing would be something higher level, more like a comment on approach, or an observation that there is some high-level redundancy or opportunity for refactor. Something like "in an ideal world we would offload some of this to an external cache server instead of an in-memory store but this is better than hitting the DB on every request". That kind of observation may come up in top-level comment on a code review, but it might also come up in a tech review long before a line of code has been written. It is about extending that attitude to all aspects of dev.

▲ jiggawatts 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I have a crippling guilt about not keeping my apartment as spotlessly clean as my parents did theirs, to the point that I end up procrastinating, which just makes it worse.

The trick to overcoming this is not to aim for "clean" but for "cleaner than before".

Just keep chipping away at it, whether it is a messy codebase or a messy kitchen.

	▲	zoogeny 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I use it for cleaning all the time. Whenever I have dishes, I always give myself permission to do as little as I want knowing that one clean dish is better than nothing. Most often I end up doing them all. The other saying I say is "completion not perfection". That helps me in yard work especially. I'm not going for the cover shot of "Better Homes and Gardens", I just need the lawn to be cut.
	▲	Waterluvian 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I call it “sweeping back the desert.” The sand blows in endlessly. You don’t aim for a pristine, sandless land. But you can’t ignore it or it takes over. I’ll just pick up a few things and ferry them towards their “home.” Or go do a small amount of yard work. Etc.

▲ nonethewiser 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's perfectionism.

I always thought perfectionism meant extremely high achievements (for too great of a cost). But it can also be quitting without any progress because you can't accept anything less than perfect (which may or may not be achievable). Perfectionism can be someone procrastinating on a large task.

▲ tt_dev 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Obama - what a time to be alive