How to Ship a Simple Feature in Two Months
I started working on a feature to allow users to remove notebooks in Braindump two months ago. What started as adding an additional link and a corresponding flask endpoint to handle the deletion has turned into a horrible long running branch that I have no idea how to get out of. This is a common trap that I fall into, and I have seen other developers struggle with the same issues.
Scope
Add a Feature to allow users to remove notebooks.Implementation
Easy Peasy, here is a link to delete notebooks. Ship it.Side Tracking
Well, while we are here, maybe we should use the new "card" style that is hip now. Hmm, wait, this looks stupid in purple. Let's make it blue. The cards look great, lets make the rest of the site blue as well. Ok it looks awesome in blue. Have not looked at CSS in a while, maybe we should refactor it, switch to SASS and concatenate all of the CSS into a single file. Oh crap, doing this breaks the outer theme compared to the inner theme since they were defining rules for the same elements. No problem, I will just rewrite the whole UI again.30 commits later
What problem was I trying to solve again?Conclusion
This is actually what happened. No matter how many times I tell myself I will never fall into this trap again, I keep on doing it. Next time will be different. In any case, the new notebook view looks good and allows you to delete notebooks. I hope to have this shipped this year.Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- Lev Lazinskiy
- Lev Lazinskiy
- Lev Lazinskiy
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Terminal RSS Reader With Nom
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass from Fernando Borretti
- Make AI Boring Again from charity.wtf
- The logical destination of LLMs from Andy Bell
- Revised rules of engineering leadership. from Irrational Exuberance
- The circus freaks of open source from Drew DeVault's blog
- Clanker: A Word For The Machine from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- I ran a half-marathon! from gluecko.se
- My Running Tips from Kevin Bell's Blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Om Malik 1966-2026
(Note: This is a special edition of The Torment Nexus, dedicated to my friend Om Malik, who passed away due to congestive heart failure at the age of 59. I wrote this on my blog, but I thought some people who subscribe might also be interested. If you aren...
via The Torment Nexus June 27, 2026Pluralistic: Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers (27 Jun 2026)
Today's links Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers: Under no circumstances should you rush out and read the book that prompted Mark Zuckerberg to demand $111m and eternal auctorial silence. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object...
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow June 27, 2026I'm in bed, I have the windows wide open, and the fan on full blast, and I'm actually starting to feel cold. I'm very glad we're finally reaching the end of this heatwave.
via Chris Hannah June 27, 2026Generated by openring