Never use a dependency that you could replace with an afternoon of programming

Re:Never use a dependency that you could replace with an aft... by nomel on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @04:03PM (#24125313)

> "This'll take an afternoon" - three weeks later...... > Programmers are notorious for this.

From my experience with these personal failings, the problem usually comes from the question being phrased in the context like, "before you begin working on this, how long do you think this will this take you to complete?". If there's no opportunity to scope, with requires not insignificant work towards the solution, the estimates will always be wrong. If I understand the actual scope of the problem, which means have the architecture mostly worked out, and have a bit of experience (and luck), my estimates can be pretty close, usually eaten up by that oh-so-seductive feature creep that ruins my work file balance.

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Re:Never use a dependency that you could replace with an aft... by OJFord on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @05:50PM (#24126439)

I recently read through the (free online) 'book' on Basecamp's 'shape up' methodology; I thought the 'hill chart' describes this really well - the work needs to be in progress going up the hill discovering what it's all about, before you get to the top and can accurately assess how much 'real work' (!) there is to do, and then it's all downhill from there.

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Re:Never use a dependency that you could replace with an aft... by tome on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @07:04AM (#24130698)

> the (free online) 'book' on Basecamp's 'shape up' methodology

FTI: https://basecamp.com/shapeup

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