Keep Your Head Up

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From an old Raganwald interview, I derived some inspiration this morning:

“Quite often we see something and we're very tempted to say "oh! this is a special case of a more general thing." and then we solve the general thing. However that is an infinite recursion: it's always a special case of a something more general and if you're always climbing up the tree on to the more general thing you'll eventually wind up with a PhD in computer science... and no code.

However, on the other hand, if we just scrabble along the earth and we never, sort of, poke our head up and look around to see the more general thing we are constantly re-solving the same problems, you're not even recognizing that two different things we solve are both aspects of same thing. So what I try to do is I always try to recognize what that general case is, and then discipline myself not to solve the general case until it's really an imperative but not to be ignorant of the general case.”

On the continuum of thinking in general, more theoretical terms and the more practical nuts and bolts, I’ll admit I err too often on being practical.

I’ve been in the trenches a lot of late so this is a good quote to meditate upon. Especially in a week like this: at the end of an iteration, being asked to “work overtime” to try to get things done and out to customers, it’s very easy to stay in scrabble mode rather than having the disciplines of study and analysis that keep the general case in mind.

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