The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

We are playing software factorio and the winning move is not to play.

I'm seeing myself in the text, but one aspect that doesn't seem to be covered enough is the ego.

I find joy in receiving praise from my colleagues when they have good experiences with my tools.

Amazing piece of text. Honestly, I saw myself in everything you wrote. The struggle, the attempt to write a single line of code to make it perfect, durable, etc. it never works at the first try...but man the joy of having the control over fixing things... And I also relate with the personal chaos that maybe we tend to fix by fixing our software... I see a lot of this "unfinished" behaviour with other things in my life as well... Cleaning the shed, finishing videogames.... Sometimes even the feeling of having the challenge is enough...I don't even try, because I know it will take time to make it right

So true. I have tried building from scratch so many times for specific use-cases with my own opinionated experience only to recreate the bloat over time. That’s actually good. The alternative was building something based on momentary spark of creativity that no one, not even me end up using.

> Knowing which problems are worth your energy.

This, but with proper balance. TBH, you can live a happy life if you just stop caring about every technical problem, but that would make you unimaginative and passive. Just make sure your pick a hole (or two) you're gonna die in.

Welcome to your thirties!

Can't disagree with any of that

I have spent some percentage of my life attempting to rewrite all software from first principles up.

Software is so spectacularly broken. Applications that don’t let me adjust the position of a little button for my work habits. Why is that impossible!?! A global software and commerce system, where you can buy candy or transfer $ billions, both with cute warnings like “Please, oh, please, sir! Please don’t hit the back button!”

I can sum up the results of my quest quite simply: “The rewrites continue…”

Is this chasing windmills? The case for that seems solid on the surface, but…

Every rewrite of a specific set of features, or a platform for enabling better support for efficiently and correctly commingling an open class of features, inevitably runs into trouble. Some early design choice is now evidently crippling. Some aspect can now be seen to have two incompatible implementations colliding and setting off an unnecessary complexity explosion. Etc.

But on the other hand, virtually every major rewrite points to a genuinely much improved sequel. Whose dikes hold up longer with less finger holes to plug, for a better return. Before its collapse.

Since there must be a simplest way to do things, at least in any scoped area, we have Lyapunov conditions:

Continual improvement with a guaranteed destination. A casual proof there is a solution.

It’s a dangerous phantom to pursue!

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It would be interesting to compile a list from the heady 90’s, when corporations created boondoggles like Pink and Cyberdog, and had higher aspirations for things like “Object Linking and Embedding”.

You just don’t see as many romantic technological catastrophes like those anymore. I miss them!

we wont fix things by adding but deleting

[delayed]

This resonates

nice