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
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Edge Detection with Inkscape
- Lev Lazinskiy
- Spring Security, Webjars, and MIME type error
- Using cgit
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Joining Cursor from Fatih Arslan
- Pluralistic: Digital sewer socialism (08 Aug 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making from Ludicity
- No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass from Fernando Borretti
- Is it ethical to use AI? from charity.wtf
- The logical destination of LLMs from Andy Bell
- Revised rules of engineering leadership. from Irrational Exuberance
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Oh Hey, It’s Not Just Me
My whole life I’ve felt like I have great eyesight (and I still do). But lately I’ve been noticing what feels like…some slippage. Nothing big. Just this feeling in the morning like, as my brain and body wake up, my vision needs to as well. The strange nove...
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog August 14, 2026“What actually happened was the birth of a genre in digital graphics”
A really well-produced 27-minute video from Super Splash Wave about 8-bit and 16-bit pixel art: What I liked about the video is that it doesn’t just revel in nostalgia, but goes deeper into some techniques and trends and details in the videogame graphics o...
via Unsung August 14, 2026curl performance
tldr: the live version is here: https://curl.se/perf/ How fast is “fast” and is it good enough? Does it run as fast now as it did before or was there a regression? What exactly needs to be fast? How fast is it? These are questions that many projects and pr...
via daniel.haxx.se August 14, 2026Generated by openring