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 mastodon or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- Dagger Feels Like Magic
- Setting up ANTLR4 on Windows
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- 20 Years of Ubuntu
- видно по глазам - you can see it in the eyes
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Serendipity from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- Andrea Veri: GNOME Infrastructure migration to AWS from Planet GNOME
- A Whale of a Time from https://popagandhi.com/
- Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Sahil Dhiman: 25, A Quarter of a Century Later from Planet Debian
- Reflections on Palantir from Nabeel S. Qureshi
- Reading Old Posts from Kev Quirk
- Capture less than you create from David Heinemeier Hansson
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Script Doctoring
I’ve been having a number of communications problems in my interactions with my doctors at Kaiser lately, and it’s becoming one of those things where the burden and onus entirely is placed upon me to sort out, and that’s exhausting for the actually autist…
via Bix Dot Blog October 22, 2024Blockchain company Forte acquires games studios, demands secrecy, shuts them down
Sometime in 2023, blockchain firm Forte acquired game studios Phoenix Labs and Rumble Games. However, it would be a year before this came to light, because according to a report from Game Developer, Forte demanded secrecy from employ…
via Web3 is Going Just Great October 22, 2024Initial explorations of Anthropic's new Computer Use capability
Two big announcements from Anthropic today: a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and a new API mode that they are calling computer use. (They also pre-announced Haiku 3.5, but that's not available yet so I'm ignoring it until I can try it out myself.) Comp…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries October 22, 2024Generated by openring