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by agwa
4860 days ago
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It's good to have this kind of drive, but writing replacements for existing tools/libraries because they're flawed, while fun, can be an incredible distraction from the end goal of shipping your product. I know this from experience. It's a balancing act: sometimes it's worth it, but often you'll spend more time writing the replacement than you'd spend using the bad tool. Tom Preston-Werner is also incredibly lucky that he can write a spec and overnight a half-dozen implementations crop up. I wish that worked for me! |
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I think that's an excellent point and more or less goes along with my comment on this. I think what TPW was doing was actually trying to get out of the rut of completing the real work by trying to have some success and pleasure which would spur him on to finishing what he needed to do (as evidenced by the tweets) (reminds me a little of not getting into real work but spending time "organizing" first under you get the energy up to tackle the real task). Sometimes simply writing shell scripts gets me in the mood to do the "real work" that I have to do (programming or non programming).
Once again, nothing wrong with this approach I just don't think it's an example as stated of a "doer" which is not the same as saying that the behavior doesn't have any value.