Laziness Prevails

Hi,

Laziness prevails. Always. Countless times I’ve tried to adopt beneficial routines.

I joined a gym - after a few months, I barely went anymore.

I baked my own bread - after (admittedly) two years, I no longer did.

I got up at 5 am to meditate and exercise - I couldn’t maintain this for more than 4 weeks.

As good as these routines would have been, had I kept them up for years - they come with high investments. Carrying them out takes a lot of energy. To muster up the will, pack your things, hop on a bike, and head to the gym. That requires energy.

The execution of the routine isn’t the problem. Getting to it is.

Today, I don’t have a gym membership. But I still exercise. I’ve converted a little corner of my basement. There are free weights, resistance bands, and a mat for floor exercises. That’s enough. Now taking half an hour for a few exercises is no hassle.

And that’s how we humans function. Anything that requires a lot of energy is difficult to maintain as a routine.

It’s the same in software development. You’ve certainly worked in a team where barely any unit tests were written. Why was that? I bet: it was because it was annoying. It was just too much effort. 100 things had to be mocked to test one simple thing.

What about documentation? You’ve probably said, “The documentation here is outdated” more often than you’ve been able to simply send someone a link to read.

It’s the same symptoms. It’s too much effort to do the right thing. And that’s why you must always ensure that regular tasks are as simple as possible. If documentation is constantly outdated, then simplify it. Bring it closer to the code and don’t have the developers who write the documentation switch their tool.

If you have to mock too many things to write a test, then reduce the dependencies in your code. Make it as easy as possible to write tests. Implementing UUIDs as primary keys just to make writing tests easier is a valid reason.

Laziness prevails.

Rule the Backend,

~ Marcus