You Can Do It

Last updated: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 11:01:00 GMT

Put your back into it.

Today, wading through some heinous crap it's my duty to maintain, I found a comment I'd written in July of 2003, detailing what I had thought would be a short-term expeditious hack. For different reasons, I couldn't be bothered doing any better a job today than I could those years ago, so the comment now looks like this:

# [CAR20030707]
# We're assuming that if this is for fs0, we've been passed
# a username.  Not a good idea, but for now ...
# [CAR20051219]
# And, lo, for now turns out to be over two years.  Still,
# I'll be leaving soon enough, so let's just tack some more
# crap on.

As I was wandering off for a coffee, I realised that at some time over the last year or so, I started believing something that I've long "known." Namely, that the trade-off point between the ongoing battle with someone else's crappy system and scrapping the the whole lot to implement it properly is considerably more in favour of scrapping than you think.

In any game, I suspect, but definitely in mine, short-term expeditious hacks tend to stay here they're left, because there's never time to go back and change anything. And, besides, if it's working, why fix it? There's always something else to do.

The other lesson I seem to have come to believe in, rather than just paying lip-service to, is that you can do more than you think you can, if you just have the balls to get started.

A friend of mine recently said -- of my demigod-like mechanical skills -- that the most important lesson I had learned at my father's knee was that there were so many things I could do. The very knowledge that you can do if you try leads you to try, and so many things are little more than the application of method and sense.

Looking back on some of the God-awful decisions I've made in the past three years -- because I was frightened to tug at the one loose thread protruding from the ball of string, or because I thought that it'd be more work to just toss the ball of string and wind my own -- I've come to the conclusion that I couldn't have been more wrong.

If I'd bitten the bullet back in 2003, I'd be in a very different position than I am now. At the very least, I'd be leaving behind things I was proud of, rather than documenting my excuses.