That’s the trouble with falling in love.

Tim Visher

Try as many ideas as you can in pseudocode before you start coding. Once you start coding, you get emotionally involved with your code and it becomes harder to throw away a bad design and start over. – Steve McConnell

I love this quote. I’m amazed every time I do anything how sold I get to the way that I started doing it. Just this past week I was working on a problem and I began in a certain way without too much thought up front. 3/4 of my way into the day with almost no progress having been made, I was still hacking away at the same solution, convinced that I was just too close to the problem or just another half a dozen lines of code away from solving it. What I should have done is stopped 2 hours into it and said, “This isn’t working. I can’t see why it should be this complicated. It must be the ’solution’ I came up with. Reset.”

This works in other areas of life as well. Taking the time to do a little analysis and design up front can save you boatloads of time and frustration, not just because you shouldn’t make as many mistakes during the actual implementation of whatever adventure you’re going on, but because it really is hard to give up on something once you feel committed to it.

This is probably why most people are still at the jobs they are.

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