Hey, howdy, hallo,
I’ve been coding my side project for ~8 months, and I’m doing my best to stick to the “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” mentality. There’s a fine line between spending the right amount of time on something, and wasting time on minute details. If I got sucked into every minor issue indefinitely, I would never get it done.
What prompted me to write this email is an issue I encountered yesterday. I was working on coding the sorting functionality for columns that also had a checkbox option. I kept seeing an ambiguous error in my browser developer tools telling me that something, somewhere, was going wrong. I started my normal troubleshooting routine and watched the clock count.
One, two, five hours later, I still hadn’t figured it out. From all my testing and troubleshooting, everything was working as expected. The columns were sorting the data correctly, and the checkbox selection was working just fine. When I clicked the “save” button, everything was written to the database as expected.
I took a step back to think about what the problem was. Was there an issue? I was seeing an error, but everything was working exactly as I expected. It had been 5 hours, and what had I accomplished? I opened up my issue tracker, added the details and how to reproduce it, and logged the issue. Logging an issue is my way of letting an issue go until a later time.
There are glaring issues that obviously need to be fixed. Other times there are minor annoyances (like this, that I shouldn’t spend 5 hours on). Write it down, and come back to it some other time. In the future, you’ll know more and likely be able to solve the problem easier. It’s ok to not have things be perfect.
I try to practice this same behavior in my privacy journey. Is my setup perfect? Absolutely not. But over the years, it’s gotten pretty good. When I come back to a topic I stepped away from, I find it much easier to digest and come up with a viable solution.
Remember, you don’t need to figure out everything all at once.
Depending on which part of the globe you live, I hope you’re enjoying the start to summer!
-Josh
This site has some interesting roadside attractions in the US.
"Part of success is staying alive long enough to have the right kinds of things happen to you all at once."
I intentionally don’t include any tracking or analytics in my emails, which makes it tough to tell if anyone actually reads them. If you enjoyed this email, feel free to reply with a 🌞 and if you didn’t 💩.