I really need to get my blog up and running so that I can write about things like this.
My view is that dependencies are someone else's solution to my problem of technical debt.
I'd be a straight-up liar if I claimed to be proud of every line of code I've written, either for an employer or for myself. Sometimes you just have to hammer a square peg into a round hole and be done with it because deadlines. Or lazy. Or boredom. Or whatever this project is going nowhere anyway, so wtf? Hack the shit out of it.
I always tell myself I'm going to get back to that later and clean it up, but I often don't because, well, moar deadlines.
Dependency updates--particularly breaking ones--are things I love to hear about. Dependency updates give me an excuse, both professionally and for my side projects, to revisit stuff that I knew was janky and crappy and broke when I wrote it, but have since come to accept.
Security updates are absolute gold in this game of not wanting to suck but still having to meet deadlines.
"Sorry boss, but there's a vulnerability in lib x. We have to update. But it's breaking. So now we have to refactor. Two weeks, at least. Maybe more."
I just got rid of a crap-ton of bad code while I was updating for that dependency. Oops.
I didn't get my blog up and running until I a) started keeping a journal on 750words.com and b) started writing in a spiral-bound notebook every spare half-hour.
Those two habits and https://blot.im made blogging nigh-effortless. Like dandruff, I get it for free.
Oh my problem isn't that at all. I have no problem writing endless amounts of crap that no one will ever read. It's just that I really care about my writing, and I want it to have a perfect home. So I'm constantly writing and rewriting blog engines.
In this case, the perfect is the enemy of no one. A blog engine is the one side-project that I don't just hack. It's my one and only place for writing pure, elegant code.
And I won't let myself write at length again on someone else's platform until I get this exactly right.
Everyone wins: I don't clutter the internet with inane crap; you aren't tempted to read it.
If I ever decide to start publishing my writing, the best part of it will be the code that presents it.
I was(am?) in the same boat as you. I don't like using other platforms because they don't do exactly what I want. I go through the same decision points while trying to maintain a todo list. I guess that is the drawback of being a developer, you know you can do better(for your usecase) job of developing a great application and eventually, writing a blog or maintaining a todo list becomes an excercise in yak shaving (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2est2c_yak-shaving_fun ).
I am trying to get over this habit. Any advice/suggestions would be appreciated.
Thanks for sharing this and introducing me to 750words, I just finished my first entry! The analysis provided after just a single writing session is awesome - I can't wait to see how this affects my writing, focus, and ability to communicate with myself and others. Did you see a shift in sentiment, focus or elsewhere in your analysis as you prepared to make your writings public? For instance, I notice a pretty even distribution of Emotion and Mindset which I imagine will become way more focused as I work towards writing in public.
The only writings I make public are short essays I write during the day about victories and frustrations at work. When I am following the "morning pages" habit, I am usually extremely short on focus.
I am extremely pleased with how journaling improves my communication — when I find myself quoting that morning's pages, I get feedback on how decent my predictions were.
I feel more prepared, having hypothesized these circumstances in the morning, the afternoon offers fewer surprises (and novelty still fits nicely in contrast).
My view is that dependencies are someone else's solution to my problem of technical debt.
I'd be a straight-up liar if I claimed to be proud of every line of code I've written, either for an employer or for myself. Sometimes you just have to hammer a square peg into a round hole and be done with it because deadlines. Or lazy. Or boredom. Or whatever this project is going nowhere anyway, so wtf? Hack the shit out of it.
I always tell myself I'm going to get back to that later and clean it up, but I often don't because, well, moar deadlines.
Dependency updates--particularly breaking ones--are things I love to hear about. Dependency updates give me an excuse, both professionally and for my side projects, to revisit stuff that I knew was janky and crappy and broke when I wrote it, but have since come to accept.
Security updates are absolute gold in this game of not wanting to suck but still having to meet deadlines.
"Sorry boss, but there's a vulnerability in lib x. We have to update. But it's breaking. So now we have to refactor. Two weeks, at least. Maybe more."
I just got rid of a crap-ton of bad code while I was updating for that dependency. Oops.