We all have weird things we do, long ways around short problems. We should probably get around to sorting them out, but we've gotten used to That Way Of Doing Them.
Sometimes we've created monster workflows that Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson would eye suspiciously before backing away from. Sometimes we hold onto them because they're comfortable, sometimes because fixing them seems too difficult, sometimes just because we don't know any better until it's way too late to make any difference.
What do you do that fits this description? Well, what are you vaguely embarrassed to admit to, anyway?
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Cover image by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash.
Top comments (10)
Sadly being a pretty good procrastinator
Back in university I was tinkering around with Unreal Development Kit for fun, I was making a framework for RTS games. UnrealScript had delegates. I'd just finished functional programming 101. Everything must be delegates! After stacking delegates on delegates I got the language to tell me 1+1=0.
No matter language, I always seem to find the slowest way of debugging.
Luckily there always seems to be a rockstar around the corner that senses something is wrong and takes their time to show me the fastest way. I never figure it out myself tho, I'm just going with the flow.
Great question, but I'm struggling to come up with an answer. I think it's rare to choose the long way of doing something if you know a better, faster way exists. I'm sure I have plenty, but I'm almost certain they'd be in my blindspot.
For me the absolute worst is probably writing out really long commands by hand instead of just taking the 5 seconds to write an alias for them
I manually type 'git clone REPO', then 'cd' into the folder when I am sure there is a way to automate it. I like having the muscle memory.
I walk to the far end of town to buy coffee when there's a perfectly usable coffee machine less than 10 feet away from my desk. That counts as inefficient, right?! :)
Well that counts as sensible if the coffee machine is anything like the one in my office!
Reverting to MS excel to do things like ‘text to columns’ instead of writing a little re-usable script for it
For me, its my overthinking. When I get a new task, at the end I always regret thinking so much on it.